Frankfurt Book Fair Gets First With Internet Rights Deals

They said bestselling Irish novelist Maeve Binchy was close to a final deal to sell Internet publishing rights of one of her titles as a result of the auction.

This is the first step toward a new medium of publishing and to a commercialisation of publishing on the Internet, said Laura Fillmore, president of US publisher Open Book Systems, which organised the auction jointly with the Book Fair.

The auction, a test case for the industry, offered Internet rights to Binchys popular novel Circle of Friends, chosen partly to mark the Book Fairs Irish theme, and to US Internet expert Gregory Rawlins Moths to the Flame: Seductions of Computer Technology.

 

Until now, while texts of books have appeared on the Internet, there have been very few licensing agreements and no established procedure on how writers should be reimbursed for Internet use of their material.

On Friday, Rawlins publisher, Boston-based MIT Press, said it had provisionally accepted a bid from newly-formed German joint venture, QBIS-Apple Tree, while Binchy is considering two rival offers from unnamed companies.

Binchy, in Frankfurt for the Fair, said in a telephone interview she was confident that releasing her work on the Internet would not hurt her book sales, as is often warned.

People said this about radio, then about television, then films and then videos but we have the most buoyant book market ever. This (book) world is not like a cake which gets smaller when you cut a slice ... its more like a pile of stones that grows when you add a new one to it, Binchy said.

Bids for the rights were registered anonymously at a special Internet site and broadcast during the Book Fair, the biggest of its kind, which runs October 2-7.

Details were sketchy on the sums involved in the successful bids, with organisers referring to a four figure US dollar sum, but saying final details needed to be worked out.

It was also unclear how many bidders were involved, but Fillmore said the Internet auction site had received 15,000 hits, or instances of access by interested parties, most of whom were established electronic publishers.

All participants rejected the idea that Internet access could damage the book market.

Nobody wants to take a computer with them to bed or onto the beach. What this means is bringing a whole new group of people to read your work, said Binchys agent Christine Green.

Green said Binchy would in any case most likely plump for a proposal to release extracts of her novel in several different languages over the Internet for educational purposes rather than a full-text option.

Officials at QBIS-Apple Tree, formed hastily at the Book Fair in response to the auction opportunity, said they were working on ways to restrict access to their Internet site, creating a model that might be extended to more printed works.

However Thomas McCorkle, marketing manager for Rawlins publisher MIT, said the form the final Internet publication would take was not his priority.

For us this is more a question of how we will be reimbursed, he said.