One way to conquer pirates is to co-opt their territory. To chase would-be pirates off Scribd.com, Simon & Schuster has announced it will deploy some 5,000 e-book editions on the website, reports Brad Stone in the New York Times. Though still in startup, Scribd has mushroomed into a hugely popular locus for writers to upload documents, including books.

Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts, Scribd has not been able to bar its doors to those passing off as their own the work of others. But, like a policeman giving a sample garment to a dog to sniff, once the website’s filtering software recognizes a legitimate copyrighted text it will instantly identify and reject imposters. Call it pre-emptive piracy management.

But there’s a far less subtle motivation for publishers to cast their lot with Scribd: its irresistibly low commission on sales. In the first decade of the E-Book Revolution, retailers charged the same 50% discount for the sale of digital content that brick and mortar bookstores charged for print. Foremost among the fifty percenters is Amazon and its Kindle. But of late publishers have begun to question the 50%-off shiboleth. Guru Mike Shatzkin gave sharp voice to this restive group. Pronouncing high discounts “daft,” he declared “There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts.”

“Now,” said Shatzkin, “is the time to change this.” You can read about it in detail here.

Picking up on these populist sentiments, Scribd came out of the chute charging 20% off the list price to its content provider customers, and that includes publishers. Stone quotes Scribd chief executive Trip Adler as declaring that S&S “is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales.”

Other standard bearers of Big Publishing may well join the rush to Scribd. The anti-piracy features are certainly attractive, but the telling factor may well be a desperate need to push Amazon and other etailers back to a commission structure that is, well, not quite so daft.

RC

In October 2008 Random House circulated a letter among literary agents announcing a shift in e-book royalties from one based on list price to one based on actual net moneys received. Five months later, Simon & Schuster has followed Random’s example. “Beginning March 1, 2009,” writes Judith Curr, Executive Vice President and Publishers of S&S’s Atria Books division, in a Dear Agent letter, “all Simon & Schuster contracts worldwide will offer a royalty of 25% of net receipts for all sales of all electronic editions including eBooks and audio book downloads.”

Although publishers’ royalties are presumably negotiable, the boilerplate on one recent (pre-March 1 2009) Simon & Schuster contract called for a 15% list price royalty. That means that on an e-book retailing at $10.00, the author would be entitled to $1.50. Switching to a 25% royalty on net receipts, the author will now receive $1.25. How is that number calculated? Most e-book retailers take a discount of approximately 50% of an e-book’s list price. If S&S collects $5.00 from the retailer, the author will get 25% of that, or $1.25. a reduction of twenty-five cents per sale from the previous arrangement.

One significant aspect of S&S’s policy statement is a clarification of the way the company arrives at list prices for e-books. Curr’s letter states that “we have, with limited exceptions, adjusted the suggested retail price for our eBooks to mirror the price of the most recently published edition of the book (hardcover or paperback), rather than the discounted prices we had been using.”

Translated, that means that if S&S issues a book in hardcover, the e-book price will be commensurately high; when S&S then releases a cheaper paperback edition, the e-book price will proportionately drop. The rationale (if that is the right word for it) for this approach is spelled out in a recent posting, Penetrating the Mysteries of E-Book Pricing. Kind of.

It’s hard to say if 25% net e-book royalty will become “standard” throughout the publishing industry but with majors like Random and S&S leading the way, that would seem to be the direction things are headed. (By way of comparison, and as a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a royalty of 50% of net receipts for e-book sales, and has done so since its founding in 2000. On a $10.00 book, that means a royalty of $2.50. At no point is the royalty rate ever reduced.)

– Richard Curtis

In an earth-scorching fulmination including a denunciation of “my once-tough, beloved Guild – my UNION”, Harlan Ellison announced that he has launched a lawsuit against CBS-Paramount, Inc. and Writers Guild of America. Papers filed in the United States District Court for the Central District of California cite “breach of the duty of fair representation” and “breach of the Collective Bargaining Agreement”.

The specific issues are failure to account for and pay licensing and publication revenues resulting from publication by Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, divisions of Paramount, of a paperback trilogy that Ellison alleges is a “knock-off” of his famous Star Trek episode The City on the Edge of Forever; and the failure of the Guild to support his complaints or take action against Paramount. He seeks unspecific damages from Paramount, but because he remains a loyal member of the Guild he is asking for only one dollar from the union. However, he also seeks “a judicial determination as to whether the WGA is doing what its stated purpose has been since day-one! To fight and negotiate for him and other writers.”

Ellison reserves the full measure of his ire for Paramount:

“The arrogance, the pompous dismissive imperial manner of those who ‘have more important things to worry about,’ who’ll have their assistant get back to you, who don’t actually read or create, who merely ‘take’ meetings, and shuffle papers – much of which is paper money denied to those who actually did the manual labor of creating those dreams – they refuse even to notice…until you jam a Federal lawsuit in their eye. To hell with all that obfuscation and phony flag-waving: they got my money. Pay me and pay off all the other writers from whom you’ve made hundreds of thousands of millions of dollars…from OUR labors…just so you can float your fat asses in warm Bahamian waters.”

And that’s just for warmups. As long as you’re prepared to confront both barrels of his 12-gauge invective, you can read the complete text of his press release here.

The City on the Edge of Forever is a poignant love story that takes the viewer back to 1930s America. Kirk and Spock race to apprehend a renegade criminal and restore the order of the universe. It is here that Kirk faces his ultimate dilemma: a choice between the universe – or his one true love. It became the classic Star Trek episode, winning the 1966-67 Writers Guild of America Award for best teleplay and the 1967 Hugo Award (the only teleplay ever to do so!). It was also ranked as one of the”100 Greatest Television Episodes of All Time” by TV Guide.

E-Reads has published the original teleplay of The City on the Edge of Forever as Ellison intended it to be aired. The author’s introductory essay (expanded by 15,000 words) reveals all of the details of what Ellison describes as a “fatally inept treatment” of his creative work.

Ellison is determined to have his day in court. Read his screenplay, introduction, and the description of his lawsuit and you can vicariously serve on the jury.

RC