When publishers create digital versions of their material, they need to pay attention to some potential copyright problems.
One of the biggest is that if the publisher obtained a license to use art, or charts and graphs, those licenses may not permit the publisher to use that material in a digital edition of the book. Modern licenses should take those things into account, but if a publisher is converting older titles, they may not.
Even if the license does allow digital publication, it may put other restrictions on use that can affect the publisher’s business model. It may, for example, limit sharing, or the publication of excerpts.
Another thing to consider is text to speech (TTS). If a digital book includes a TTS function, that may conflict with the publishers rights (or marketing strategy) for audio books. For more on this, see E-Book Legal Restrictions Are Screwing Over Blind People.
After reading that article cited above I wanted to be sure my kindle books have TTS enabled. By default, any book that uses the 70% royalty program allows TTS, but I couldn’t see how you enable it for books that use the 30% royalty.
Publishers are adapting to the fact that eBooks aren’t sold the same way print books are sold, which means they might not be sold the way the publishing contracts envision. For example, you can’t sell one chapter of a printed book the way you can an ebook, so the idea of excerpts and subscription services poses an interesting challenge. Is it a “sale” when a digital version of a book is downloaded as part of a book subscription service, like Oyster or Amazon’s Kindle Direct?
According to Spotify for books, …
Most subscription services have agreed to pay publishers each time a reader gets a certain way into a book — typically around 10% — and the fees are about the same as if they had sold it as a one-off download.
Under KindleUnlimited, Amazon pays the publisher based on how many pages the subscriber reads.
Publishers will have to keep an eye on this model. If it catches on, a lot of contracts will have to be adjusted.
It’s an exciting era for publishing, which is getting more complicated all the time!