Since the dawn of the digital age – call it Year 2000 – publishers and agents have separated e-rights into two categories.  One is verbatim text rights – plain old e-books.  The second is interactive use of texts in combination with music, video, audio and other media – what have come to be called enhanced e-books.  Commonly, agents struck the latter provision out of publisher boilerplate.  Why?  Because film studios and networks felt that  enhancements incurred on their ability to dramatize the books they acquired.

But with development of vooks and similar hybrids of text and other media (“Vook” = Video + Book), publishers are challenging the assumption that interactive rights must be reserved to authors. As enhanced e-books become viable and valuable, publishers want to know why they are abandoning rights to movie and television companies.

That is the background for the memo that a major literary agency has sent to a number of film agents informing them that henceforth they cannot count controlling those interactive rights.

The memo declared in part:

“As a result of this fundamental change in publishing, we will no longer be able to agree to the boilerplate language in most studio option/purchase agreements that address multimedia. These clauses usually restrict the author’s reserved electronic book rights to digital text only. We cannot agree to this limitation. Authors’ reserved ebook rights must now include the right to grant enhanced digital rights in their work, including all the elements mentioned above.” The memo made it clear that “enhanced digital editions, as long as they are non-dramatic, are best exploited by the author in conjunction with the publisher.”

Despite this distinction it’s not likely that Hollywood is going to take this shift lying down. Where enhancements end and movie effects begin will certainly become a bone of contention, so this is going to get interesting and probably adversarial. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.

Though enhanced e-books are on everybody’s tongue these days, we suspect you won’t see a flood of them any time soon.  The cost and complexity of clearing permissions and the time it takes to produce works of real quality will in all likelihood restrict the number released to a precious few.  But that may not be the point, as we will eventually see when the titans of publishing and Hollywood clash on the field of enhancements.

Richard Curtis

Think you’re addicted to YouTube now?  Your fifteen minutes a day – maybe five or six videos of two or three minutes each – are a fraction of the five hours you spend daily watching television. Google, YouTube’s owner, is not happy about that and has plans to raise your dose substantially.

Dude, when YouTube is through with you you’re gonna be freebasing videos.

You probably haven’t been aware of it, but right now you have too much choice.  When you go on the YouTube website you make choices about what you want to watch.  When you finish watching a video you have the choice to select another or to exit the website.  YouTube doesn’t care for choice one little bit. “Every decision point is an opportunity to leave,” says a company executive, and opportunities to leave are not good for business. Not good at all.

Randall Stross, writing in the “Digital Domain” feature of the Sunday New York Times, says that YouTube has devised a strategy to capture your attention to keep your eye on the screen and your hand off the exit key. “This fall,” writes Stross, “YouTube says it will introduce a radically different, uncluttered look, with YouTube Leanback. It will have a separate Web address and will start playing a video the moment a user clicks on the site. When one video ends, another will start automatically, eliminating those dreaded ‘decision points’ that invite abandonment.”

But there’s more – hours and hours more.  Stross reports that the chief of YouTube’s user experience team – yes that’s actually a title -  says the site is stepping up its long-form content – “television shows, professionally produced Webisodes and movies, as well as live sporting and music events.”

Prepare to trade in your couch for…another couch, compliments of YouTube.

Read details in YouTube Wants You to Sit and Stay Awhile.

Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

In Watching Books, an Authors Guild Bulletin article published last summer, I wrote

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed – even, God help us, bored – when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium.

As I’m not a social scientist, these observations were not supported by hard research or statistics. Thanks to Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University writing in the New York Times, they are now powerfully reinforced by metrics supplied by such solid data gathering organizations as Nielsen and ComScore.

Surprisingly, Stross focuses not so much on the Internet as on television. You’d think that TV, like print media, would be losing ground to YouTube and other Web distractions (nearly 100 million viewers watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos in December alone!). In fact, watching television in the third quarter of 2008 increased by five hours a month compared to the same period in 2007. “Tellingly,” says Stross, “YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership – it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen.”

In short, whether it’s YouTube or BoobTube, “A tipping point has been passed in the competition between print and screen that has been under way since the beginning of broadcast TV and now continues with video and other media.”

Stross’s conclusion: “People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.”

In Watching Books, I wrote,

The fundamental appeal of books is their ability to transport us to the author’s world. The best books immerse us so deeply in that world that we become almost immune to distraction. But screens are breeders of distraction from the sort of commitment to thinking, reflecting, and imagining that books demand. Books are vehicles for ideas; one can set a book down and ruminate and process. Computer monitors, television sets, and e-book screens discourage reflection. Thinkers simply live in a different time zone from watchers.

Stross echoes my own disheartening comments: “We used to speak of reading a book as an immersive experience, too, but ‘immersive’ now seems shorthand for ‘video on a screen.’” What worries me most is that book editors, especially young ones coming into the business, will be affected – or infected – by that same disenchantment with words displayed on screen that is touching everybody else. If editors start putting down their Kindles or Sony eReaders and asking, “Is that all there is?,” we will know that the End Days of Book Publishing have begun.

“Smitten with screens” is his phrase for it, and I can’t think of a better one. Read Why Television Still Shines in a World of Screens in full and – if you can spare a little time between your TV programs and your Internet videos – reflect.

Richard Curtis