18.516 author's rights

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 516.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

         Date: Sat, 22 Jan 2005 09:34:46 +0000
         From: Ross Scaife <scaife_at_gmail.com>
         Subject: Re: 18.511 author's rights

> --------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 21 Jan 2005 08:54:54 +0000
> From: "Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett" <bkg_at_nyu.edu>
>
> I would highly recommend joining the Authors Guild:
> http://www.authorsguild.org/. You will receive, as part of your
> membership, a "model book contract," which you use to negotiate better
> terms. You will also support an organization that advocates for authors.
>
> Never sign away all your rights.
>
> Excerpts can be found here:
> For books: http://www.authorsguild.org/?p=101
> For articles: http://www.authorsguild.org/?p=102
> For electronic rights: http://www.authorsguild.org/?p=103
>
> Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Many thanks for these interesting links. When I follow the first one,
for books, I see at the end under point 9 "Don't allow the existence
of electronic and print-on-demand editions to render your book in
print."

I can understand the first part of this easily enough, an electronic
edition being indeed different from a book, but why are authors also
being advised to reject print-on-demand methods for their work?

I ask because I am embarking on this very option right now, for a
collection of peer-reviewed conference proceedings. We intend to
publish the proceedings at the Stoa site so that readers may freely
read online and/or print out each of the contributions, but we will
also gather them all together and offer them as a very
reasonably-priced book using the on-demand model via lulu.com. That
way authors can correctly assert that their scholarship has ben
peer-reviewed, they can say they have contributed a chapter to a book,
they retain 100% of their rights, and readers have a full range of
choices, from desultory browsing to having a tangible book in their
hands on their shelf, if they so desire. I don't see the downside to
this approach, and it seems to resolve many problems.

Ross Scaife
Received on Sat Jan 22 2005 - 04:57:16 EST