Via The Book Oven comes this Pimp My Novel post about legal cases and how this leads to abundant unread books being pulped on an annual basis.
Because publishers lose money on returns/remainders/pulping (and face losing even more money if they don’t do this), they compensate by ordering smaller initial orders than they used to and allowing titles to go out of print faster. For a midlist author, this means fewer copies of your book are sold/shipped to stores and remain in print for less time than they would have pre-Thor. While there are potential missed sales here, the publishing houses generally come out on top by doing this, whereas most midlist authors get the hammer.
The comments lead to further discussion of this subject, with one commenter arguing that ebooks are a vast improvement on this:
Never out of print, always available instantly on demand. It’s the future regardless of how you feel about that book store on the corner.
What I do find myself wondering, though — if this is the case (and I’m not convinced that it is), what’s going to happen to the future version of, say, Joe Meno — whose first two novels were originally released by large publishing houses and subsequently re-released by Akashic in forms more to the author’s liking. If we are looking at the eventual rise of electronic formats for novels, what does that imply for authors who aren’t satisfied with the handling of their work? Can one ever have the rights to one’s novel returned if the concept of “out of print” becomes moot?
Hence, Cursor’s three year contract… :-)
I’m guessing that the rights issue will be the same as it is with music. Things don’t have to go out of print, but they become unavailable on some legal services anyway, which drives consumers who might otherwise buy product to piracy.