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Over the last few years, many publishers have been battling with contracts that didn't see the electronic age coming. They've had to renegotiate countless deals with writers, illustrators and photographers to allow them to redeploy work digitally. Some publishers (I worked for one myself) didn't recast their standard contracts even when the electronic age had arrived in large illuminated boxes on their very desks.
Many publishers are trying to be more forward-thinking now. Recently I was shown this clause, from a UK publisher's standard contract:
"The author hereby grants to the publisher for the full term of the text copyright and any extensions of that period the sole and exclusive licence in all languages throughout the world and universe to reproduce, publish, sell, rent, lend and license the reproduction, publication, sale, rental and lending of the text in the book and any adaptation, abridgement or extraction of the book in all forms, transmissions and media whether now existing or hereafter invented."
Well, that should cover everything. It means that if the publisher decides to bring out a telekinetic-braille rental edition of the work for blind caterpillars on Jupiter, that's fine. Presumably the standard royalty rate still applies, somehow.
Publishers don't like to have to go back to their authors to get their agreement every time they want to exploit a work in a new form. It takes time and actual people hours. But why should it? I'm willing to bet that after weeks of to-and-fro emailing, this contract will be printed out, put in an envelope, posted to the South African author, who will sign it and post it back, where it will be photocopied and, once it's sat on the publishing director's desk for a while, posted back to the author, all over a period of about two months.
Surely the electronic age allows us to work a little more efficiently than this, on the fly, and to check in with authors when new publishing formats become available? As publishing formats multiply by the week, shouldn't contracts be stored more like Facebook profiles than paper documents? My contract could be kept online, for me to login to to view, and show a list of check boxes for publishing formats and royalty schemes to which I could choose to agree: print, ebook, microfilm, telekinetic-braille; flat-rate royalty, rising royalty, flat fee, freeby, and so on. Those choices would automatically produce a nice list of books the publisher could sell in each format. This would not require very advanced programming, either.
If an author doesn't agree to a particular publishing format, too bad. They lose out, and so does the publisher, for their sins in contracting an author who isn't really interested in getting their book out there.
Snail-paced negotiations have driven us into a corner, where publishers are desperate to get blanket permission to do anything they think of, for fear of ever having to speak to their authors again. And authors make it worse by trying to make this as difficult as possible for the publisher, who will go on to rewrite their standard contract in even more expansive terms for next time. If we keep going this way, it's only a matter of time before 80-page, perfect-bound contracts include trans-dimensional distribution clauses and special-sales rates for Arctic gnomes. And they wouldn't even surprise us.
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