In the last year, the mighty William Morris Agency, angry over the new language in the electronic-rights clause, refused to do business with Random House (a position that has softened a little since). Then in April, Julia Child, a longtime author at Knopf, a Random House subsidiary, parted ways with the company. Child and Knopf had been wrangling for some time over electronic rights. When she decided to put her next project, a baking book, up for auction, Knopf refused to take part. Child signed on with William Morrow & Co.; she publishes her CD-ROMs with Microsoft. But while Random House and its hard-nosed contract are getting most of the publicity, the tempest extends throughout the book industry. Within the last five years, computers and CD-ROMs and the Internet–in short, anything that can be shoveled under that vague heading “multimedia”-have undercut or rewritten all the old definitions in book publishing.
No one even knows what to call things anymore. Books have become “content,” something that might exist between hard-covers, or on a computer or on a disc. A manuscript is “intellectual property.” And everything-from novels to the notes from your room on the Net–is “information,” a word we’ve made to mean so many things that it has been bleached of meaning.
When a writer’s work is endlessly malleable-when a manuscript can be published in hardcover or electronically, reconfigured for CD-ROM presentation or hacked up and recombined with works by other writers-the big question becomes, who owns these different versions? This is what the shouting in publishing is about. The fact that the fights over rights are mostly speculative–not about what is happening but what could happen in five years or six months-makes them all the fiercer. Nobody wants to be left at the gate.
So far the new technology has wrought the greatest changes in publications like cookbooks or reference works, where how something is displayed matters as much as what is said. But that’s no solace. As Alberto Vitale, head of Random House, says, “publishers have to become a lot more nimble,” adapting not only to new technology but also “to the evolution of the mind-set of the consumer.” In other words, publishers not only have to guess what people want to read but also whether they’ll want it in book form, or on CD-ROM or even online.
Terrified that they will be cut out of the next hot development, publishers are rushing to claim as many contractual rights as they can imagine, including, in some cases, licensing rights “throughout the galaxy.” On the other side of the table, authors and their agents are also fighting to hang on to every right they can. Says Owen Laster, co-head of William Morris’s literary division, “I’m very nervous about agreeing to something that’s changing on a daily basis.”
Surprisingly, the only people in publishing willing to show a little guarded optimism are those who speak for writers. Robin Davis Miller, executive director of the Authors Guild, argues that “no amount of land-grabbing on the Information Highway will change the fact that authors are necessary.” And while author Scott Turow worries about having his own books pirated on the Internet, he still insists that the “chaos” spawned by multimedia is “the most refreshing antidote to mass culture that we’ve had in this society for a long time.” Soon, he predicts, important writers “will emerge off the Internet. They will simply put their stuff out there for free and find an audience.” The point is well taken: the new technology makes it easier for writers to publish themselves. But there’s a hitch. As information proliferates–in bookstores or online–the publisher’s role as arbiter becomes more important, not less. Like an old married couple, publishers and writers will always need each other, no matter how loud and hard they fight.
