How about this for an exercise in nostalgia—Random House saying it holds e-book rights in “the vast majority of our backlight contracts”? Are the Random lawyers eager to revisit the famous Rosetta case when similar issues arose over the works of such greats as William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut and Robert B. Parker ? Richard Curtis has the details.
As Ron Hogan sees it, this is “a warning shot” across the bow of Open Road Integrated Media, ex-HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman’s new startup, which intends to offer digital versions of thousands of old p-books for the Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Nook and other hardware. It will also publish original books and develop films, so maybe that’s a fallback if Random makes the e-repub biz too perilous. Any copyright-hip lawyers care to comment on the chances of this happening?
And speaking of Ron Hogan: Congratulations on his appointment as director of e-marketing strategy for Houghton-Mifflin.
