Q: What are subrights?

A: In the future, maybe everything!

Okay, first let's answer the question based on what subrights commonly mean in the publishing industry NOW.

Subrights are the permission to use the content from the primary license the publisher has purchased (almost always the book) in subsidiary forms. When a publisher buys the right to publish your book, that company usually secures all subsidiary rights in the deal. This allows him or her to exploit these secondary rights him or herself, or more commonly to sell these rights to others to create new products that disseminate the content and generate new revenue streams.

Common subrights are film and video rights, audio books, workbooks, gift books, e-books, translations, book club editions,  international editions, commercial rights, gift products, and according to the contract language of many publishers, any medium that now exists or that will exist in the future in the universe.  In other words, anything that can house your words.

The basic reasons that publishers secure subrights, the right to re-license what you've sold to them, are:

a. Most book publishers, not surprising, are very good at creating books, but also not surprising, not as good at creating other products that expand the reach of the content, like motivational coffee mugs or Lithuanian translations or motion pictures. But they do have staff or have contract workers who can find companies that do those things very well.

b. Since the publisher invests significant money into taking a book to market, with no guarantee that the book will be profitable, his or her default position is to reserve all opportunities available to earn a return on that investment. 

So does the publisher get all the money? Not unless you signed a bad deal. The standard contract terms is for publisher and author to split the proceeds.

Why should I give the publisher all these rights? Don't if you don't have to. But unless your name is Stephen King or John Grisham, it's probably going to be a deal breaker for the publisher. And if you have no history of selling subsidiary rights, why hold onto them? If you have a compelling argument on why you can outperform the publisher - i.e. Ridley Scott has already bought an option on the screenplay adaptation of our work - or you know your publisher doesn't attend international events and has never sold a translation right - or your uncle owns a direct mail book club - then fight for them! If you think you can outperform the publisher, try to negotiate a time limit for the publisher to have exclusive right to sell subrights to your work - or counter his or her offer with terms that give you a bigger share of the subrights revenue if you generate the sale.

How important are subrights? For many publishers, their core business, creating books, is a break even proposition; profits come from subrights. For the most successful authors, creating a book opens up opportunities for many other ways to express their content, while making more money and promoting sales of the original license, the book.

Can subrights hurt? Sure. If you've written a motivational classic and the publisher sells quotes to an employee award company that makes really ugly plaques with your name on every single one of them, then yes, it can hurt you. If the sell of subrights doesn't generate new business but only replaces what the publisher would have sold anyway (cannibalization), then there's really no benefit.

With the proliferation of e-books in particular, the reality is that subrights might soon be the only thing you, an author, sells. In other words, the primary product will be the content and any expression of it will be the sublicense, including the veritable paper and ink book, which may or may not be necessary to distribute the content.

That's undoubtedly a long ways off.  Or is it?

Oprah Winfrey just reported that the Amazon Kindle is now her favorite "gadget". That means the future might be closer than you think!

Q: Will e-books ruin book publishing?

A: Of course not.

Okay, let me qualify that. If by ruin you mean "bring an end to" and if by book publishing you mean the "careful and professional preparation and dissemination of long form intellectual property expressed in words" then I stick by my answer and say, of course not.

Now if by book publishing you mean the above definition but specifically and predominantly in a paper, ink, and binding medium, then I guess the answer is possibly. Maybe the readers of the world will gradually or spontaneously decide that we don't need to kill any more trees and that electronic dissemination and acquisition is the only way to go. First, I would say that in the world of book publishing content is king and packaging secondary - a tough admission from someone who makes a living as a gift book publisher. So if paper, ink, and binding some day go away, I would simply say, no big deal. I don't think that's going to happen any time soon as the latest research (the PubTrack program from Bowker) indicates that 82% of Americans - who represent one third of the book publishing market - still prefer printed books exclusively.

In his book Business At the Speed of Thought Bill Gates asserted that we tend to overestimate the amount of change new technology will cause in its first two years but underestimate the amount of change that will occur in the next five years. How long has Amazon had the Kindle and Sony its e-book reader in the market? If Gates was right then it will be 2012 or 2013 before we have a pretty good idea where e-books are going.

Now if by book publishing your definition is closer to "long form intellectual property expressed in words" no matter what media is used to distribute the material then I would say for that to come to an end some entirely different dynamics other than an e-book reader would have to be involved. Mike Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson and my boss, raised the question of what the Internet is doing to our brains in his blog, particularly in relation to its impact on long form reading. He cites Nicholas Carr's article in the Atlantic Monthly, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Carr's observation is that as the Internet has become his universal medium, concentrating on longer pieces for more than a couple of pages has become increasingly difficult. Carr says:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

Since an e-book, at least in its most popular hardware expressions, is designed to essentially look, feel, and behave like a a paper, print, and binding book, you can't blame it for any for any widespread impact on people's ability to apprehend long form content just because it's in a digital format.

Again, citing the most up-to-date research from Bowker's PubTrack data, in 2007, 164 million Americans over the age of 13, about 75% of the population with discretionary spending power, purchased at least one book. Book consumption is greater with age but still relatively constant. And for those who assert that junior readers simply won't read unless the content is wrapped up in a digital sight, sound, and interactive experience, I'd simply point to the Harry Potter phenomenon where seven- and eight-year-old kids could suddenly read 800-page books! There is an ongoing voracious appetite for books across ages and within all the niches of the human marketplace. And America won't always account for one-third of all book consumption.

So will e-books ruin book publishing? Absolutely not. Will they change book publishing? Over time, most likely, but not in its essence.

So book publishing, a medium brought to the masses by Johannes Gutenberg through his invention of mechanical printing almost 600 years ago, is safe for at least another millennium?

Now that's an entirely different question! Give me a sec and I'll see if I can google an answer!