Bastards.

Another of the irritating aspects is that print on demand quality is typically inferior- you don't have to be a journeyman pressman to see the difference between something printed on a big web or sheet fed offset printer versus what are essentially glorified laserjet printers, especially on really bright or colorful covers.

Meanwhile, many of the domestic print on demand providers are outsourcing to foreign production.

Why are Simon and Schuster such fucking assholes?

Schuster especially.

ugh...."and they can make a compelling case to us that it should be so" sounds alot like "not a chance in hell".

Well, that's fucked up. Going out of print was pretty much the only way a lot of people could get the rights to their own work back, and with this, I don't see much of any way at all now.

Hey an author does not have to sign with them on that contract. As a business they have every right on all FUTURE contracts to word them any way they want including sign in blood and your soul is ours type stuff. Nothing is forcing anybody to sign. There are other publishers out there. If you really want to be with S&S and you don't like that part of the contract make an addendum to the contract that makes it do what you want. If they really want to publish you they will do what it takes. Once the contract is signed though it is much harder to go back so when their people say "Hey don't worry about those words now" that should be a big warning to WORRY ABOUT THOSE WORDS RIGHT NOW!

If they refuse to change the contract then they are not the right publisher for you. Go directly to their competitor.

That being said, Simon & Schuster are still douches.

Wow. I was just beginning a law journal paper on "orphan works," i.e. out of print books, movies not sold on DVD or shown in theaters, etc. The 1976 copyright system eliminated re-registration, so it took the ability of a lot of works that aren't selling to fall in to the public domain away. This throws a nice hiccup into my paper.

Well, I guess I'll be ignoring S&S when I finally get around to writing that novel...

Yeah, but if people don't show organized opposition to this (like they are now) then this will become an industry-wide precedent.

I always thought Simon was the evil one, just has the look of a serial killer.

Yup

What Simon & Schuster have done is what all other big publishers are going to do eventually, and on the whole it's going to be good for authors. True, PoD books will be available only in "dribs and drabs", but the only books that would be relegated to PoD status would be the ones selling at this rate. In the past, a sales rate of "dribs and drabs" meant impending doom for a title; now it's enough for the title to live on indefinitely.

And the quality isn't bad at all. Discard notions of blinding white paper and smudgy black ink. Most of the trade paperbacks you buy from major publishers could be replicated almost exactly by today's PoD technology.

As for the issue of taking back rights, in principal it sounds awfully important but in practice the odds of an author "reviving their career" by taking back the rights of their book and shopping it elsewhere are infinitesimal. Think about it: your book was published by Simon & Schuster, one of the biggest publishers in the world, but it's now selling so poorly that they'd put it out of print if not for PoD: who's going to pick it up and think they could do better with it?

What this article doesn't mention is that PoD is economical only on very short print runs, so in the event that a book relegated to this status starts to pick up sales velocity, there's a very good chance it'd get a traditional printing as it would have in the old days. The difference being of course that in the old days it would have gone out of print never having a chance at a second life.

Why would a writer with a publishing deal need to use a print on demand service?
Surely if a better offer came in once it was relegated to POD, it could be made to include a buy-out.

I can see that this development could become a problem, but this is similar to what has and will happen in the music and film industries and the 'spectre' of print on demand is no more scary in reality than digital downloads.
Writers signing contracts with publishers just need to be more savvy about what they sign up for.
And if they ain't signing, publishing houses are just going to have to be offering better incentives, aren't they?
Its called progress.

I think if anybody's using a print on demand service which can't give them commercial print quality they need to shop around.