Electronic rights-, power source or static?For the same reasons, you will probably want to grant only a
short term of license. New technologies are coming out all the time.
Where they compete, exclusive licenses will be more valuable than
nonexclusive ones. To protect the value of your properties, place
strict time limits on their exposure. If granted any electronic rights,
your book publisher should keep them only for a short time after
publication, especially if the publisher is unable to license those
rights or exploit them in house.
Next, a question of more immediate interest to genre novelists
and their agents: to whom can I sell my electronic rights? Slow
down, though. You cannot sell them if you do not control them.
That is the main issue over which the current war is being fought.
What stance should you take? The AAR position paper identifies
two types of electronic rights: electronic versions of the book ("elec-
tronic books" or "text-only" versions), and enhanced versions ("mul-
timedia"). The position paper states that nondramatic rights—that
is, versions without adaptation, audio, or visual components—are
simply different forms of the printed book and may be controlled by
the publisher in the same way that they normally control paperback,
book-club, and similar rights.
A problem arises, though, with regard to electronic anthologies,
which in high-storage-capacity CD-ROMs can be enormous.
Authors should be able to control the context in which their work
appears; therefore the position paper states that authors should be
given approval of any electronic use or license.
Multimedia rights should always be controlled by the author, just
as are film, TV, stage, and radio rights. Now, most publishers are
today insisting upon at least a first-look option on multimedia rights.
Whether or not to grant that can be a dilemma. In authors' defense I
must point out that there is no reason to expect that book publishers
will prove better at creating and selling multimedia products than,
say, movie studios. In fact, so far the most successful publishers of
multimedia products are software companies. Why should book pub-
lishers, then, have a favored position when it comes to licenses?
In addition, the AAR position paper also points out that tradi-
tional royalty rates may be inadequate in the face of the lower costs