If you’re a big publisher who can’t see past the dead trees on shelves business model, your goose is already cooked. While the old school music labels and Hollywierd managed to have copyright laws written to guarantee their ownership of their back catalog in any format forever, the right to to distribute electronic copies of old titles owned by authors doesn’t exist. In fact, many big name authors are self publishing electronic copies of their old works without giving a cut to their original publishers.

A bunch of really well known authors, working via their agents, have decided to route around their publishers and offer some of the most popular books of all time as ebooks directly on Amazon’s Kindle, without going through a publishing house. Among the books released through this effort are works from Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, Hunter S Thompson, John Updike, William Burroughs and Saul Bellow along with many others. Basically, some of the biggest names in literature from the 20th century. (Techdirt)

Of course, new author contracts include the publishers right to distribute “all formats”. That makes me wonder why any writer would want to play with any publisher.  Unless there’s a 100% guarantee you’ll have a permanent spot on the very scarce shelf space at the mega retailers, self publishing in ebook and print on demand format makes more sense.