Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

  • Mood:
  • Music:

Why can't I buy the ebook of X outside the US? A brief territory explanation.

So people have been asking a lot lately "Why can't people outside the US buy the e-book edition of X?" (In this case, X = any given work that is unavailable in a specific region. Most often "Countdown," since it lacks a physical edition, but almost everything has fallen into this category at one point or another.)

The answer, sadly, is simple, and not something that's easy to fix. Basically, when I sign a contract with a publisher, they acquire certain territorial rights. DAW owns the US distribution rights for Toby and InCryptid. Orbit owns the US and UK distribution rights for Newsflesh. Other publishers own my distribution rights in other regions. The pieces I have sold to the Orbit Short Fiction Program ("Apocalypse Scenario #683" and "Countdown") were sold under a contract which, at present, covers only US territorial rights. Meaning that my publisher can't make those properties available outside the United States. They aren't allowed. And buying the rights for every possible market, in every possible region, would make the work fiscally unsustainable for them.

Part of this is tied to the intrinsic value of a property. Say, for example, that we want to sell the InCryptid books to a UK publisher, for a UK edition. This would make the physical books cheaper for UK customers, since they wouldn't need to pay import costs. This would mean I got paid (foreign rights sales are a good chunk of my income in a given year, since it's a way to keep a book that's already been sold paying my electric bill). But if we tell a UK publisher "oh, and by the way, we sold the ebook rights to that series to someone else," that publisher isn't going to buy the series. There's too much tied up in ebooks right now for that to be fiscally wise of a publisher.

Orbit is working on making the short fiction pieces available outside the US; if you check the Short Fiction landing page, they note the problem exists, and that they're looking for a solution. But the solution is never going to be "sell global ebook rights to the US publisher," because if authors did that, the foreign rights market would collapse. Books would remain import-expensive, non-English readers would lose a lot of diversity, and my cats would get very hungry.

It sucks that it works this way, just like it sucks when I can't get the British or Australian TV shows I want on the right region format immediately. It may change someday. But for right now, this is why things are the way they are.
Tags: common questions, living in the future, technology
  • Post a new comment

    Error

    Anonymous comments are disabled in this journal

    default userpic

    Your reply will be screened

    Your IP address will be recorded 

  • 31 comments
I think it might be time for a Seanan wiki. We can maintain it and point people to FAQs (like this one) so that you don't have to. Who's with me? :)
Heh.

Deleted comment

Building something like this wiki using the existing LJ tags might actually be relatively simple.

Articles like this one could be used pretty much verbatim, with editors to clean up or add to topics as further updates are published.

If it were moderated and checked by someone authorized by Seanan, and linked from her website(s) it might be a very useful resource, beyond a simple FAQ.
This very issue is (a subset of) something that I spend a lot of my time trying to rectify.
Best of luck. It drives me a little crazy, because so many people assume that I, personally, am blocking their ebook purchases.

jimhines

5 years ago

ironed_orchid

5 years ago

seanan_mcguire

5 years ago

danjite

5 years ago

Deleted comment

The "rights" under discussion here aren't "copyright." As a programmer might say, copyright is important, but it's in a different part of the stack.

Unless Seanan is writing work-for-hire (which I doubt), she continues to own all her copyrights. The "rights" under discussion in a conversation like this are licenses. People get very confused about this sometimes.

Variations in copyright law affect the ways that publishers, agents, and authors structure their deals, but generally only at a certain level of remove. Most of what Seanan is talking about is a matter of customary business practice, not law.

seanan_mcguire

5 years ago

As pnh says, this isn't copyright; this is license rights. I never, NEVER sell my copyrights.
Even in the case where the company purchases world English rights, for example, and they can in theory offer the ebooks for sale in all territories, there are corporate difficulties; the corporations are set up like small fiefdoms, and each branch decides what it will -- or won’t -- adopt. Since ebooks are considered part of book-territorial rights, and each satellite from each country decides which books will have local distribution, the rights are often not used.

We hold all English rights to the books we sign. However, we only SELL in the UK and US in electronic and dead tree formats.

/marketingmanagerforpubhouse

True.
*sighs* Getting imported TV legally is so much easier than this...
Except that generally, you're getting imported TV in a physical form (DVD box sets, etc.). So the electronic versions stay just as difficult.
Some ebook vendors determine which books you can purchase and download by tracking the purchaser's IP address. Thus, if your IP puts you in Manila, you can only purchase ebooks that they can sell in the Philippines. For systems where you purchase a book for your account and it appears in your virtual library for download, it is sometimes possible to have someone log into your account from an IP in the US and purchase the book, which you can then download from your account's library to an IP in another country. The publisher has sold the book to a US address, you have the book in Manila, and everyone is happy.

Warning: Such an act may be in violation of the DMCA (everything else seems to be) and I make no claims to the legality of said act or whether your conscience will let you sleep nights after you do so.

Side-note: Should you happen to have an e-reader from a major chain bookstore and want to download books while you are on vacation in Italy, this trick should also work for you. See above disclaimer.
I'd much rather have everyone able to purchase the books legally in whatever location they happen to currently be. Given the issues discussed above, that's not terribly likely. Failing that, I'd prefer to have people purchase a legit copy in another market rather than download a pirate version.
One other way around the problem is to get the audio book edition, which has different right available. Audible is quite good at ensuring world rights are available world wide.
That's how I "read" "Apocalypse Scenario #683".
True!
Thank you so much for the explanation. I never knew it was so complicated. Thanks for the tip on getting the audio book, that sounds like a good solution!
Yeah, it's complex.
Silly idea: Could you offer them through one of the systems directly, for the territories that aren't covered?


at least until you sold the license for that country?
Technically, I could, except for the part where my friends and agent would beat me bloody if I tried something that labor, time, and brain-intensive. Not only that; it WOULD endanger my ability to sell the work in the regions impacted. And seven ebook sales = sadly not worth giving up ever having a German edition.
A friend linked me to this post and it has been helpful to get me to understand why ebooks were restricted.

Your remark here has made me wonder. I live in Belgium myself and so English books get translated to Dutch or French by the publishers here. I never read in either, though, and usually by my English copy through Amazon. I wonder how this works with ebooks, though. Could this possibly mean that in my country, I'd be limited to a translated ebook?

seanan_mcguire

5 years ago

Useful info. Thanks, Seanan :)
Welcome.