Creative Commons Media Neutrality and eBook Rights after Rosetta v. Random

Here's where it gets complicated.

Not so long ago, book publishers had no idea that there would be such things as digital books. Publishing contracts mentioned nothing about ebooks. Literary agents made sure to keep derivative rights separate, so that translation rights, film rights, stage adaptation rights, etc. for a successful book could be separately monetized.

When ebooks started to become important, the digital publisher Rosetta Books took advantage of the situation, and started acquiring ebook rights to well-known books such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This did not please the print publishers at all. Random House, one of the "Big Six" US publishers, took Rosetta to court, saying that their publishing contracts gave them exclusive rights to distribute books, and ebooks were books.

And here’s where it gets REALLY complicated. The District Court ruled against Random House, but narrowly, and the Appeals Court upheld. It wasn't that the ebook's bookness was obvious one way or another.  The courts only refused Random House’s request for an injunction.  Random House had asked the court to order Rosetta Books to immediately “cease and desist” selling ebook editions of Random House books.  Without an injunction, Random House would have had to continue with a lengthy legal preceding to assert its publication rights.

Instead, Random House negotiated a settlement with Rosetta Books, one which allowed some older books to be issued in ebook format by Rosetta. Rosetta got their ebook rights and Random got an undisclosed revenue share, according to Publisher’s Weekly. The details are not public, but the practical result seems to be that if Random House does not want to reissue an ebook of a book based on an older contract, they will allow the author to contract separately with a third party, such as Rosetta.   Open Road Media is a more recent, and more aggressive, ebook "reprinter," and they have also contracted separately with authors and estates for ebook editions, such as the "enhanced" From Here to Eternity; Random House retains print rights only.

Despite this uncertainty, the book publishing industry has managed, for the most part, to avoid destructive legal battles. It seems to be understood by literary agents that ebook rights for works under pre-Rosetta print contracts are to be offered first to the publisher with print rights. While Random House will often waive ebook rights, Harper, S&S, Penguin, Macmillan, Hachette seem to block 3rd party licenses, slowly adding the backlist ebooks to their ebook catalogs, and only if they can get authors to accept the current standard ebook royalties, 25% of net.  If no agreement can be reached on royalties no ebook is published.

For other publishers, the situation is confusing. According to Rosetta, "in England, the agent and author community has been clear for ten years that these backlist electronic rights are owned and controlled by the authors". Smaller publishers will often revert ebook rights because conversion and distribution costs for backlist books make it too expensive to create an ebook only to keep ebook rights.

The effect of the Rosetta v Random non-decision has been that a large number of works whose print rights remain with a publisher have ebook rights which  may be subject to dispute.  Often these books are scholarly works or trade books with little commercial value.

Our goal in building Unglue.it is to work with rights holders to re-license books such as these with the financial backing of book lovers everywhere. These "unglued ebooks" would be "given to the world" under something like a Creative Commons (CC) license. But how can such a license be applied when there is  such uncertainty around ebook rights?

One problem is that the Creative Commons licenses are media neutral. If I release a print book under a CC license, there's nothing in the license to stop anyone from scanning it, turning it into an ebook, and distributing it on their website. Similarly, a CC ebook can be printed and bound, and redistributed with the same license, so long as the other license terms are obeyed.

It's not enough to have ebook rights to release a Creative Commons ebook, you need to have print rights cleared as well! ¹ (If you thought this article had reached the zenith of complicationness, you thought wrong.)

If what you're really interested in is ebook rights, then why use a Creative Commons license? With a CC BY-NC-ND license, the allowed noncommercial print uses are probably not very valuable.

Looking at this issue with our legal counsel, we considered the option of creating our own "Unglue.it eBook License" which would be similar to Creative Commons but which would prohibit even non-commercial printing. Unfortunately, this option would:

1. require us to establish an entirely new publishing "standard" license;
2. add legalese and restrictions that supporters and rights holders alike would find unfamiliar and undesirable;
3. lose the benefit of the universal and clear standards of the Creative Common licenses.  CC licenses, for example, can be recognized and acted on by automated search engines.  Precedents exist for what is allowed. For almost a decade, CC licenses have allowed authors such as Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow to publish successful commercial print and ebook editions alongside open access, CC-licensed ebook editions.

A different strategy would be to use a standard CC ND license, but to add a technical obstacle to printing which does not conflict with open access for the digital version.  If we created something inherently digital (e.g. with revisions that include animations throughout that can’t be printed), then printing a version without animation would violate the non-derivative aspect of the license.

We're not enthusiastic about this option either.  Just as legalese confuses normal people, the subtleties of media technology are likely to confuse lawyers and Judges. If someone wants to object to our interpretation of a “derivative use,” there's no technology that can keep them from suing.

A third option is by far our top choice, and is the one we will pursue. Get the various rights holders to agree among themselves!  Since the CC BY-NC-ND license only allows incidental and not-for- profit printing of ebooks, print publishers willing to let an author unglue an eBook using this license should also be willing to waive any conflict with their “exclusive” print rights.

Authors and publishers have mostly managed to get on with business without a clear legal decision on whether an ebook is a book. The possibility of a crowd-funded payoff shared by print and digital rights holders should create a strong incentive for them to work together to unglue the ebook.

How hard could it be?

Notes:

1.  Or at least, you need to have any publisher with “exclusive” print rights waive those rights with respect to any “non-commercial” printing of a CC ebook for personal use.
2. My colleague Amanda Mecke contributed to this article.
3. Yes, that's the new logo for the Unglue.it service, coming soon!
4. Standard IANAL disclaimer.

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Creative Commons - NC (Non-Commercial)

by Wahj  (CC BY-NC-ND)Real worms don't come in cans. The last time I saw worms offered for sale, they came in paper buckets, the kind that usually hold Chinese take-out. You open these up, and the worms don't jump out at you. Maybe if you left the bucket open for a day or two, the worms would eventually find their way out, but any resulting problem is manageable. So when we say that doing something "opens up a can of worms", the main thing to think about is not about the calamities that will emerge from the bucket, it's whether or not you want to go fishing today.

The "Non-Commercial" attribute of Creative Commons "NC" licenses is definitely a can of worms. "Non-commercial" is subject to varied interpretation, and the license is not entirely successful at removing ambiguities. What uses are commercial? For example, is a blog that attracts advertising revenue allowed to post a CC NC licensed ebook? Is a for-profit distributor of ebooks allowed to distribute an NC ebook? Is a non-profit charity allowed to print paper copies of an NC ebook and sell the copies? Is a for-profit copy shop allowed to charge a school to make copies of an NC textbook? Is a for-profit company allowed to use an NC ebook about widget manufacturing to improve its factory? Is it ok for me to show you this picture of worms? Et cetera.

In building Unglue.it, we hope that readers and institutions will financially support Creative Commons relicensing of books that are important to them. In doing so, we need to make sure that the licenses we choose enable the things that the supporters want to do. We need to balance these uses against the rights and concerns of the authors and other rights holders who would be granting these licenses.

To get a better feel for what's allowed and what isn't under NC, we have to look at the "legal code" of the license. Here's what it says in the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND) License:

You may not exercise any of the rights granted to You [...] in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation. The exchange of the Work for other copyrighted works by means of digital file-sharing or otherwise shall not be considered to be intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation, provided there is no payment of any monetary compensation in connection with the exchange of copyrighted works.

Let's examine some of our wriggling worms against this "code". Remember that I'm not a lawyer, and you should not rely on my scribblings for legal advice of any kind.

1. Go ahead and improve your lucrative widget factory. The rights restricted by the NC clause are the rights to reproduce, distribute and publicly perform the work. The Creative Commons licenses do not restrict other uses of the work. If there are million-dollar ideas in the book, your ability to exploit them for commercial gain is not restricted by a CC license.
2. If your blog is your business, it's not a good idea to build it on NC licensed photos from flickr, even if you don't charge for access. But if you're a book blogger and you make money with advertising, is posting a free ebook "primarily directed towards commercial advantage"? This worm is jiggling a bit! If you're a potential supporter of a book, this is the sort of use you probably want to support. It's not really clear how to apply the NC clause. Similarly, Apple, Amazon and Google are big companies that make a lot of money in the course of distributing ebooks. Distribution of some ebooks for free gives them indirect commercial advantages. To the extent that the uncertainly in the NC provision prevents seamless distribution of the works to their users, it goes counter to what most book lovers would want.
3. Even if you're a non-profit, you can't print and sell copies of an NC e-book to raise money for starving orphans with cancer.

The areas of uncertainty includes some use cases that we think are non-commercial uses. To make it clear that we consider the distribution of unglued ebooks for free to be an allowed activity under NC licenses, rights holders who offer works to the public through Unglue.it will agree to the following:

For purposes of interpreting the CC License, Rights Holder agrees that "non-commercial" use shall include, without limitation, distribution by a commercial entity without charge for access to the Work.

We may also require a statement to the same effect in the front matter of the released ebook; we're still working out the file format details.

Given this clarification, why not go all the way, and require that Unglue.it rights holders agree to commercial distribution of works that get unglued?

 It turns out that the alternative to our can of worms harbors some poisonous snakes. Let me introduce you to one of these. Look at the Amazon page for Dance Dance Revolution (Wii Video Game) a 140 page paperback supposedly edited by Lambert M. Surhone, Mariam T. Tennoe, and Susan F. Henssonow. The so-called publisher, "Betascript Publishing" takes Wikipedia articles and turns them into books. So far, so good. Perfectly legal within the scope of Wikipedia's Creative Commons License (BY-SA). But how would you feel if you found a Wikipedia article that you wrote (with minor edits from others) on sale at Amazon for $57.47? When this happened to my brother he was mostly amused at the audacity of it all. But I think that if the same thing happend to a book I had worked on for a year of my life, it would seriously piss me off. If I had contributed money to "give the book to the world" I would be similarly aggravated. You could argue that Betascript is providing a valuable service by providing attractive formatting and improving the discovery of the article, but please don't.

by gabrielsaldana  (CC BY-SA)Retention of commercial rights is potentially of significant value to authors, and can reduce their asking price for ungluing books. I've previously written about Cory Doctorow's experience with selling "deluxe bound" versions of his Creative Commons Licensed books. There's also the possibility that authors' prior publishing contracts preclude them from offering commercial Creative Commons licenses (I'll write more about that soon). Since most of the uses we imagine for unglued ebooks, including the uses most important to libraries, are not affected by our use of the NC-flavored licensed, we've decided to open this "can of worms" in hopes of catching more "fish". We'll allow rights holders to offer non-NC licenses, but we won't expect them to do so.

Notes: I posted yesterday on the "Attribution" in Creative Commons Licenses. Here are some links on Betascript, which has over 350,000 "books" listed in some book directories:

• The odd tale of Alphascript Publishing and Betascript Publishing
• VDM Publishing (Wikipedia)

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Creative Commons - BY (Attribution)

Have you ever wondered whether Anonymous can use an Creative Commons attribution license? The Answer is YES, Attribution licenses ARE useful, even for Anonymous.

In the process of developing the Unglue.it service, we've had to study licenses and decide which ones are best for ungluing ebooks. Since supporters will be putting up real money to relicense the books (making them free to the world), the details of the license need to be spelled out clearly, upfront.

It's a big topic with lots of considerations, so I'm going to write about our choices in three pieces. We'll be using the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND) License for most of the books that we unglue. This post will focus on the easiest choice- the attribution part. Even with attribution, there are some tricky bits.

Here is the text, or "legal code" of the attribution requirement in the CC BY-NC-ND License:

If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or Collections, You must [...] provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing:

1. the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties;
2. the title of the Work if supplied;
3. to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work.

The credit required by this Section may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all contributing authors of Collection appears, then as part of these credits and in a manner at least as prominent as the credits for the other contributing authors. For the avoidance of doubt, You may only use the credit required by this Section for the purpose of attribution in the manner set out above and, by exercising Your rights under this License, You may not implicitly or explicitly assert or imply any connection with, sponsorship or endorsement by the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties, as appropriate, of You or Your use of the Work, without the separate, express prior written permission of the Original Author, Licensor and/or Attribution Parties.

In the case of Anonymous, you can't distribute a CC BY licensed work owned by Anonymous unless you provide attribution to anonymous. You can't say that you wrote it, for example.

For Public Domain works, there's no attribution requirement. It would be perfectly legal for me to take Moby Dick, for example, change the title to Moby Duck, attribute it "the Gluejar Collective" (me and Herm), and sell it on Amazon for $100 per copy (if I get an ISBN!). It might not be legal in France, though. Unlike the United States, most European countries, and especially France, have strong protections for authors' "moral rights". In France, even if an author had released work under a non-attribution license, I wouldn't be able to use the work in a way that abused the author's name and reputation.

Non-attribution licenses (i.e. CC0) are particularly useful when many people contribute to a work, as in the case of Wikipedia, and the use of the work would be inhibited if attribution of all the contributors was required. CC0 (technically a waiver, not a license) tries to address possible conflict with laws assuring moral rights.

For Unglue.it, we expect that most creators will insist on the attribution requirement. Come to think of it, most readers and supporters would insist on it as well. You wouldn't want to read Primary Colors by Herman Melville, would you?

Note: I'm an engineer, not a lawyer, so please don't use this article as a substitute for legal advice. If you want to build nuclear weapons with it, or generate superluminal neutrinos based on the information it contains, you have my explicit permission to do so.
Update 10/20/2011: Corrected CC0 info. The "NC" option is discussed in another post.

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The Clawback of @lessig's "Remix"

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at the Harvard School of Law and a prominent scholar of intellectual property law in the age of the internet, has written several books about "Free Culture". He argues that today's copyright laws are poorly suited to copyright's original purpose of advancing the creative arts. Today's digital culture increasingly blurs the line between creator and consumer and remixes strands of media to create new works in ways that were inconceivable when copyright was invented.

To provide ways for copyright holders to participate more fully in today's digital culture, Lessig co-founded Creative Commons (CC). The licenses offered by Creative Commons will be used by Unglue.it  for "unglued e-books". "Unglueing books" is what we call the process of gathering together people and institutions willing to contribute to the cost of relicensing books they love under CC licenses. (Specifically, we'll use CC BY-NC-ND) Since Lessig has made many of his books available under CC licenses, you could say they're already unglued. By checking on the availability of these books, we can get a feel for the readiness of readers and institutions for ebooks that can be free to all readers, everywhere.

Lessig's groundbreaking first book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published before Creative Commons existed, it's out of print, and not available as an ebook. But a second edition, Code, Version 2.0 was released with a CC (Attribution, Share-Alike) License. You can download it for free from Google Books. But it's not available on the Nook store or on Internet Archive. Amazon wants $2.99 to put it on your Kindle. Kobo books wants $13.69. Worldcat reports that it's available in 462 libraries around the world, but only 11 of these libraries report holding the electronic version. Worldcat has a URL for the ebook, but it's dead. If you don't like the idea of downloading from Google, you can get it from a site owned by Lessig, or you can download it from my personal website. The non-unglued, earlier (and out of date!) edition is much more available in libraries, with 1103 libraries listing it in Worldcat.

If you think that Code 2.0 is an important book, and you want your friends to read it, you can not only download and distribute it from your website, you can print up a bunch of copies and sell them, or give them away. Code 2.0 doesn't restrict its redistribution to non-commercial uses or prevent you from making derivative works, as long as you use the same license on the copies and derivative works that you sell or distribute. The Creative Commons licenses are media-neutral and aren't restricted to digital works. Licensees (the users) may migrate the licensed works to other formats, so a CC-licensed pdf file can be printed to make a CC-licensed print volume.

The fact that only 11 libraries list the digital version of Code 2.0 in Worldcat says a lot about the chasm that the library world needs to traverse if it is to effectively support unglued books. Most libraries don't yet have the workflow to select and manage ebooks that aren't offered by their accustomed vendors, even if the price is zero. There is a huge amount of stuff available "for free", and individual libraries don't have the resources to seek out the material that's of value to their communities. But now's a great time to start. Code 2.0 is a good book to start with. There's no reason it shouldn't be available digitally to every user in every library in the world!

In 2004, in the wake of his failed challenge in the Supreme Court to the Copyright Term Extension Act, Lessig published Free Culture, How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity with Penguin Books. At about the same time, Lessig published the book as a PDF on his free-culture.cc website using a Creative Commons Non-Commercial, Attribution License.

For readers looking to read Free Culture, the CC license has resulted in availability from many sources, which dominate a Google search for the book. But although Lessig is a lawyer, his free-culture intent for Free Culture is undermined a bit by some legal flamethrowing on the book's title page:

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. 

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

This mixed message may be what's keeping Google Books and other institutions from making the book available in some ways that Code 2.0 is available.

Obviously, Penguin (the publisher) wants you to buy a copy of Free Culture instead of downloading it for free. The non-commercial CC license permits Lessig to license commercial rights separately to Penguin. Many people who read the book for free digitally will still want to buy a bound copy while many others will prefer print to digital from the start. At Amazon, you can have Free Culture on your Kindle for $12.99, which is actually a premium to the new hardcover price of $10.94. If you want the French translation, Culture libre (French Edition), it's a free download via whispernet (incorrectly described as a public domain work). If you want it from a library, the situation is similar to Code. It's in the catalogs of 1601 libraries, but only 20 of these list the ebook. If I want to read it on an iPad, I'm best off going to Internet Archive, which has it in many different formats, including EPUB. (Just drag an EPUB to iTunes, and it loads automagically into iBooks on your iPad.) I can also get it direct from Goodreads.

By contrast, Lessig's 2008 book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy appears to be a poster child for everything that could go wrong for an unglued ebook in today's environment. Remix was published in the US by Penguin and in the UK by Bloomsbury Academic. In 2009, Lessig announced on his blog that Remix (the Bloomsbury version, at least) was available as a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC) download. He even went on the Colbert Report and challenged viewers to remix his interview with Stephen Colbert:

The Colbert people even made a joke on their website about Penguin requesting a takedown of Remix.
 
Today, it seems as though the free version of Remix has been clawed back from the internet, but not as a joke, more likely it's just a bunch of unrelated mistakes. I challenge you to find it by googling. Only Scribd still has a copy (in a Bloomsbury Academic account). A month ago, Internet Archive offered it in several formats, but their page is currently dead. I'm told it's some sort of database problem. Links to the Scribd page have vanished from the Bloomsbury Academic site, which was totally revamped a few months ago. Google Books wants you to buy the Penguin ebook. Amazon wants $4.99 for the Kindle edition. Same story for ebooks from Feedbooks.

At least libraries can buy the ebook of Remix from their preferred ebook providers. Here's the description at Ebook Library. But perhaps most depressing is the entry from Overdrive:

Adobe PDF eBook Rights:
  Copying not allowed
  Printing not allowed
  Lending not allowed
  Reading aloud not allowed

It's a bit scary. Imagine if it was not just a couple of mistakes. What if a commercial licensee wanted to wipe a CC-licensed free version of Remix from the Internet, to enhance their profits. A sleazy take-down notice or two, and CC Remix would be gone, despite the best intentions of its author.

Remix comes with this description:

Remix is an urgent, eloquent plea to end a war that harms every intrepid, creative user of new technologies. It also offers an inspiring vision of the postwar world where enormous opportunities await those who view art as a resource to be shared openly rather than a commodity to be hoarded.

Let's do what we can to make that vision a reality.

Update 10/13/2011 9PM EDT: The Internet Archive page for Remix is back up; the Worldcat link for Code 2.0 is fixed. Nothing is unfixable, if we pay attention!

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Can JSTOR Solve the Course-Assigned eBook Problem?

Just imagine if libraries were like airlines. Your flight to Information could cost $20 or $2,000 depending on how far in advance you book, whether you're connecting through Seattle or going direct, how full the flight is, the day of the week, the phase of the moon, and who knows what else. Airlines employ operations research Ph.D.s who create and maintain elaborate systems to "manage the load". These systems make sure that people who have little choice of when and where to fly pay a lot more than others who have flexibility to seek low fares.

You don't have to imagine very hard to realize that academic libraries are part of a system that's a lot like the airline industry. Consider college students. Once they've signed up for a class, they have little flexibility with their assigned reading. Even a college library with a 10 million volume collection won't be of much use to them, because someone else will have checked out the assigned reading – if it's not on reserve. The student is sent to the college bookstore, where it's a pretty good bet the book won't be on sale. If the student has planned in advance, they might bought a copy used on Amazon, or borrowed it from an upperclassman.

Academic book "load management" was not devised by financial engineers, it arose as a by-product of a paper-based distribution system. Students don't perceive librarians as evil just because they haven't bought a hundred copies to supply the whole class. But the environment is very different when the books are digital. Scarcity of digital books is a manufactured fiction, so it's easy for a student to perceive the library as being complicit in a money-extraction machine, never mind the benefits that accrue globally when publishers are rewarded for producing books worthy of being assigned in a course.

Libraries hate saying “No” to their users, so ebook models that allow unlimited simultaneous access are very attractive to them. Even limited simultaneous access would help meet the needs of students. The same models are very scary for publishers, because they count on profits from selling many copies of course-assigned texts to cover their losses on slow-selling titles. Academic libraries don't have the money to replace that revenue, because the embedded practice is for students to pay for their own textbooks.

A few universities, notably Indiana University, have started to reexamine the role of academic libraries in the digital provision of course-assigned textbooks. Libraries have a better bargaining position with publishers than students, and are in a unique position to integrate digital texts with databases and other types of information available from the library. It makes little sense to tell students to come to the library for quality information- unless they need it for a class!

Publishers also have incentives to find library-based digital solutions for course-assigned reading. If the library can be charged based on the number of students enrolled in a course, no revenue is lost to used-book sellers, peer-to-peer networks or students who don't bother to read the texts. Solutions that work have nonetheless been elusive, partly because it's very difficult to have print and digital models coexisting, but also because budgets are tight all around.

At Ithaka's Sustainable Scholarship meeting this week, JSTOR's Bruce Heterick told the gathered publishers and librarians that JSTOR's ebook program, to be launched in 3rd quarter of 2012, would include a pilot program to address the course-assigned title problem. This news was warmly received by the entire audience. Books at JSTOR will make over 15,000 books available on multiple platforms (including ebrary and NetLibrary) and on multiple devices (iOS and Android). At launch, the ebooks will be offered on a sales model, and all the ebooks will be archived in Ithaka's Portico service so that libraries can be assured that their access will really be perpetual. The icing on the cake is that the ebooks will be integrated with JSTOR's discovery and crosslinking platform, which is very popular with the students and faculty at subscribing institutions.

Although the details of the course-assigned title pilot were not yet decided, JSTOR Managing Director Laura Brown responded to questions by saying that as many as 3 different models would be tried in the pilot. JSTOR's subscriber outreach has suggested that different approaches are needed in different sorts of institutions. I suppose you could think of these models as “charter flights” that can be added to package tours.

Regular readers of the Go To Hellman blog will know that I'm working on a new approach to selling ebooks. I view every market problem as a possible opportunity for the new model, which we call "unglued ebooks". Course-assigned titles are no exception.

My analysis indicates that the market dynamics for some books may favor the ungluing model. It works by aggregating donations by many people and institutions with a stake in a particular book and then paying the book's rights holders who “name their own price” to issue a Creative Commons licensed digital edition. The ebook can then be used without limit by everyone, everywhere. (OK, it’s backwards from Priceline, but we totally have to get Leonard Nimoy as our spokesperson!)

In situations where two titles compete with each other to be put on a course list, the ungluing model introduces a severe form of price competition. A title that is successfully unglued, even at a price equal to the present value of its entire future revenue stream, would have a huge advantage over a competing title that remained on the per-copy selling model. It remains to be seen, of course, whether students and libraries will be able to organize an ungluing campaign to meet the high ungluing prices commanded by books with steady recurring sales. Still, there is a huge variety of courses and books, and thus a reasonable chance that the model will work in at least a few cases.

There’s a great need for experimentation and risk-taking by libraries and publishers in the transition to the digital environment. It's good to see JSTOR step up to that plate. But don’t take my airline industry analogy too seriously. When developing new models for ebooks and libraries, let’s omit the pat-down security searches and checked-baggage fees, OK?

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Crowd-Finding the Orphan Books

A solution to the orphan books problem won't be delivered by a settlement of the Google Books lawsuit anytime soon, we learned on Thursday. "Orphan" works are ones subject to copyright restrictions, but for which rights holders can't be found or determined.  A proposal to open them up via settlement of a class action was rejected by Judge Denny Chin in March of this year. There was still hope, however, that a settlement between the parties would find a way to implement a "Book Rights Registry" that, while falling short of eliminating the orphan works problem, could go a long way towards making rights holders easier to find. I was present at last week's status conference where the parties met with Judge Chin to report their progress towards a new settlement addressing Judge Chins concerns, or failing that, a timetable for renewed prosecution of the lawsuit.  Although the lawyers for the publishers seemed to be optimistic about a settlement, Michael Boni, the lead attorney for the "authors" talked as though the their part of the lawsuit would go to trial.

No orphans here, just books being deeply
discounted at a Borders going-out-of-business sale.
Note the blurb on the book at the bottom.

While there are important copyright issues at stake in the lawsuit, I've been most interested in the proposed book rights registry. A book rights registry would compile and maintain a database of rights holders, making it easy (and cheap!) to contact, query and pay rights holders for uses that are would not be allowed without their permission or provided for by fair use. In the current environment, it can cost hundreds of dollars to clear the usage rights for an in-copyright book, even without paying anything to rights holders. With a publisher-only settlement and continued prosecution now likely, my guess is that the book rights registry is either dead or years from being a reality.

It's ironic that the past week demonstrated how badly a book rights registry is needed. HathiTrust, the research library consortium formed to manage the scans of library books generated by the Google Books program, announced plans to expand access to a small number of works that they deemed to be orphans. The Authors' Guild then sued HathiTrust to block the expanded access.

The legal experts thought the suit "borders on the frivolous", due to serious problems with the "standing to sue" issue. Only copyright owners have standing to sue to enforce copyrights in the US, and none of the rights holders were parties to the Authors' Guild suit.

A funny thing happened on the way to the courtroom, though. Under intense scrutiny, one of the purported orphans turned out to have easy-to-find parents. The Authors Guild gleefully reported that the day before filing the suit, they were able to locate a rights holder "with a few minutes of googling". This report seemed to indicate incompetence all around, HathiTrust for neglecting the few minutes of googling in their orphan-identification workflow, and the Authors' Guild legal team, for failing to address their "standing to sue" problem with "a few minutes of googling".

A subsequent blog post from the Authors Guild was a revelation. It turns out that the Authors' Guild didn't really need a registry to find rights holders. By asking for help from their large number of blog readers, they were able to identify rights holders for many more of the purported orphan works. It seems that when large numbers of people are interested to find a rights holder, it's not so much of a problem. Of course a rights registry would help, but even the best registry can't fix everything.

I started following the Google Books case over two years ago because I thought it was important to increase access to all sorts of in-copyright works. What I learned in the process made me realize that a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all solution would never work, let alone pass judicial scrutiny. An equitable arrangement for academic authors would treat authors who write for a living unfairly; and vice versa. Authors in other countries would be ill-served by a process devised with American authors in mind. I realized that access to the works most important to book lovers would only happen with lots of reader support. And that realization has led to the work at Gluejar on Unglue.it, currently in the implementation stage.

Unglue.it will address "orphan works" the same way that the Authors' Guild has done in its recent blog posts. In addition to working with rights holders that want to offer creative commons licensing of ebooks to the public (ungluing them, in our parlance), we'll give users the opportunity to "wish" for the ungluing of any book that's been published. If a lot of users wish for a book, we'll check into who owns the rights, and give them a chance to make an offering. If we can't find the rights holder, we'll ask the people doing the wishing for help. If 10,000 people ( or even a dozen, for that matter) care about J.R. Salamanca's The Lost Country, they'll do a lot more than a few minutes of googling. They'll be knocking on his door and sending him postcards from Fiji.

When a lot of people care about a book, they'll have the combined economic power to do a lot more than opening a book to snippeting and search. We'll ask the rights holders for their price to give their book as an ebook to the world under a non-commercial creative commons license (CC BY-NC-ND). That will make it possible for everyone, everywhere, now and long into the future, to use the book the way the creator always intended- to read, to learn and to enjoy.

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Ungluing eBooks Progress Report: We Have a Name!

Unglue.It will be the name of Gluejar's ungluing ebooks website. Based on feedback from blog readers and many others, we ditched the horrible-in-retrospect "BookPatrons.org", and focused on names that used the "ungluing ebooks" metaphor, which has no baggage and seems to work pretty well. We then polled subscribers to the gluejar mailing list, and twitter followers, who overwhelmingly preferred "unglue.it" over the two other finalists. Thanks to everyone who contributed!

For readers new to this blog, "ungluing ebooks" is what I'm calling the process of raising money to make creative-commons licensed ebook editions of the books that you love, so that everyone, everywhere can read them. You betcha.

The ".it" top level domain shows every indication of being the next ".ly". I recently attended a session of the New York Tech Meetup which featured presentations from startups "want.it" and "knowabout.it". ".it" is the domain for Italy. We'll want to include Italy in the service as soon as possible. I've never been to Italy. Now that I think of it, the president of any company that wants to use a country's top level domain should be required to show up there sometime. Libya and Tuvalu could use the tourism dollars! (Yes, we have unglueit.com, too.)

After Hurricane Irene.

We're developing the Unglue.it website on the Amazon cloud; in addition to the four full time Gluejar staff, we have three design and development contractors working on its construction. It's a great team, but we're still figuring out how to make our virtual office work. Even when Irene knocks out our power.

Our prototype is using the PayPal payment processing infrastructure, various bibliographic web services, and the Django web application framework. Right now, it looks like we'll hit alpha in October.

Many of the development tools we're using are new to me. I'm still trying to understand Github, and I'm enamored of Pivotal Tracker.

One of our big decisions has been to use an invitation-only rights holder strategy during the launch phase. Since dealing with rights holders (authors or publishers) is likely to be our most human-intensive task to begin with, we need to carefully manage the number of rights holders we deal with. We'll launch with a limited number of rights holders, and thus a limited number of works to unglue. If you're an author or publisher interested in ungluing a work that you have rights to, please fill out the form at the Gluejar rights holder contact page, and maybe we'll invite you. After launch, we'll add rights holders based on interest expressed by ungluers (anyone who registers with the site). Ungluers will be able to ask for any published book to be unglued.

It's an exciting and intense period for us, but rewarding in many (non-financial) ways. We hope you'll agree it'll be worth the wait.

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What's a Book Worth?

Imagine you're an author of a book that was published a few years ago, but you've retained ebook rights. Someone wants to be able to give away digital copies of the book for free to an unlimited number of readers. What sort of fee should you demand? After all, if everyone can get your book for free, they probably won't be buying the ebook anymore, and though some people might still want to buy a print copy, chances are there won't be a lot of them.

This is the central question that I've been asked over and over again when I explain the concept behind Gluejar's forthcoming ungluing ebooks service. How much is it going to cost to unglue a book?

A book industry veteran told me that when publishers sell backlist titles to other publishers, the rule of thumb is to pay twice the previous year's net sales for a backlist title. That seems like a good deal to me. If a book that sold at $15 wholesale was selling 1000 copies per year, a publisher should expect to pay $30,000 to acquire the title (and the associated revenue stream).

But I'm the type that has to understand where these simple-sounding rules come from. In an environment where everything is changing, it's worth understanding whether "rules of thumb" still have hands to attach to.

Here's another thing to imagine. Suppose someone offered to pay you $1000 per year, forever. What would you pay that person in exchange for that (reliable) promise?

If you are not a mathematician or a banker, you might suppose that no amount of money could secure such a great deal. A revenue stream that lasts forever should have infinite value, shouldn't it? It is my duty to tell you that if you thought that, you would be wrong, and the bankers and their mathematicians would be right. In fact, you can easily purchase such a revenue stream. It is called a US Treasury Bond.

For the current discussion, I will ignore the odd fact that the securities markets have for the past few days responded to Standard & Poors' downgrade of US Treasury obligations by making the same obligations more valuable. That says a lot about both Standard & Poors and US Treasury Bonds, but it says nothing about selling books.

New World Disorder, by Stephen Barnwell

Today, you can buy a 30 year treasury bond that pays interest of 3.54%. That means that you can pay $28249 for an investment that pays you $1000 a year for 30 years, and then returns your $28,249 to you. If you want a AAA investment that does the same over a hundred year term, you can buy 100 year MIT bonds at a lower price.

Owning rights to a book that pays you $1000 this year is not nearly as good a deal as owning a treasury bond that pays the same. That's because most books sell fewer copies year after year. Let's suppose that a book's sales decline 30% per year. Then the total revenue from that book will be

R = $1000(1+ 0.7 + 0.72 + 0.73 + 0.74 + 0.75+ ...)

continued to infinity. Here's where math comes in. That infinite sum is equal to a simple ratio:

R = $1000/(1 - 0.7) = $3333

But you'd do better putting the $3333 into T-bills, because very few books have the same sales year after year. If the T-bill interest rate is r and the sales decline is d, then the value of the book's revenue stream is

R= $1000/(1 - r - d ) 

Finally, it's important to note that revenue is not the same as profit. If a book wholesales for $15, a publisher probably keeps only half that as margin. So if the publisher's margin is m, and this years net sales is N, the revenue stream is worth N * m *(1/(1-r-d)). So, for 

m = 50%
r = 70%
d = 3.54%

the revenue stream is worth 1.89 times net sales. Those thumb guys weren't so far off!

Many authors will look at these calculations with some skepticism. What if a book is discovered by Oprah and becomes an overnight success? There are some things to keep in mind. First, Oprah isn't doing her show any more. If you think of owning a book as a lottery ticket, there are two more things to think about:

1. You can take cash and buy real lottery tickets
2. there might be ways to improve the lottery odds of a book. Giving your book to a million people for free, might greatly increase the value of your next book if they love the first. Just hang on to the movie rights!

It's hard to know how rapidly book sales decline. I expect it varies from genre to genre. No one knows how changes in the book industry will effect individual book sales either; I'll write about that in my next post. But the numbers indicate to me that there's plenty of room for new ways for authors realize what their books are worth.

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Library Data Beyond the Like Button

"Aren't you supposed to be working on your new business? That ungluing ebooks thing? Instead you keep writing about library data, whatever that is. What's going on?"

No, really, it all fits together in the end. But to explain, I need to talk you beyond the "Like Button".

Earlier this month, I attended a lecture at the New York Public Library. The topic was Linked Open Data, and the speaker was Jon Voss, who's been applying this technology to historical maps. It was striking to see how many people from many institutions turned out, and how enthusiastically Jon's talk was received. The interest in Linked Data was similarly high at the American Library Association Meeting in New Orleans, where my session (presented with Ross Singer of Talis) was only one of several Linked Data sessions that packed meeting rooms and forced attendees to listen from hallways.

I think it's important to convert this level of interest into action. The question is, what can be done now to get closer to the vision of ubiquitous interoperable data? My last three posts have explored what libraries might do to better position their presence in search engines and in social networks using schema.org vocabulary and Open Graph Protocol. In these applications, library data enables users to do very specific things on the web- find a library page in a search engine or "Like" a library page in a Facebook. But there's so much more that could be done with the data.

I think that library data should be handled as if it was made of gold, not of diamond.

Perhaps the most amazing property of gold is its malleability. Gold can be pounded into a sheet so thin that it's transparent to light. An ounce of gold can be made into leaf that will cover 25 square meters.

There is a natural tendency to treat library data as a gem that needs skillful cutting and polishing. The resulting jewel will be so valuable that users will beat down library websites to get at the gems. Yeah.

The reality is that  library data in much more valuable as a thin layer that covers huge swaths of material. When data is spread thinly, it has a better chance of connecting with data from other libraries and with other sorts of institutions: Museums, archives, businesses, and communities. By contrast, deep data, the sort that focuses on a specific problem space, is unlikely to cross domains or applications without a lot of custom programming and data tweaking.

Here's the example that's driven my interest in opening up library linked data: At Gluejar, we're building a website that will ask people to go beyond "liking" books. We believe that books are so important to people that they will want to give them to the world; to do that we'll need to raise money. If lots of people join together around a book, it will be easy to raise the money we need, just as public radio stations find enough supporters to make the radio free to everyone.

We don't want our website to be a book discovery website, or a social network of readers, or a library catalog; other sites to that just fine. What we need is for users to click "support this book" buttons on all sorts of websites, including library catalogs. And our software needs to pull just a bit of data off of a webpage to allow us to figure out which book the user wants to support. It doesn't sound so difficult. But we can only support to or three different interfaces to that data. If library websites all put a little more structured data in their HTML, we could do some amazing things. But they don't, and we have to settle for "sort of works most of the time".

Real books get used in all sorts of ways. People annotate them, they suggest them to friends, they give them away, they quote them, and they cite them. People make "TBR" piles next to their beds. Sometimes, they even read and remember them as long as they live. The ability to do these same things on the web would be pure gold.

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Unbound wants to be the Kickstarter for Books

... and what they really are is the editor-curated, agent-filtered Gluejar for books that haven't been written.

Ignoring the fact that tomorrow is Memorial Day (and why aren't you Brits out barbecuing anyway?), I feel compelled to write promptly about today's unveiling of Unbound, because many of the words being used to describe Unbound are similar to things I've written about Gluejar.

One of my early attempts to describe our model of "Ungluing eBooks" was that Gluejar would be "like Kickstarter for ten million books". I found that approximately 50% of the subjects tested were mystified by that description, and the other 50% got totally the wrong idea.

So the introduction of Unbound allows me the chance to compare and contrast Unbound, Kickstarter, and GlueJar.

Business model

Unbound is a conventional publisher that asks readers to pre-fund some or all of the fixed cost of producing a book that hasn't been written yet. Unbound tells you how many supporters a book needs, but not how much cash. Unbound doesn't tell you how much money they get or how much the authors get, and once a project is subscribed, Unbound publishes the book, and splits net profits 50/50 with the author.

Kickstarter is not a publisher at all. They just let creators ask for a specific amount of money to support their projects, including projects that might result in the production of a book. Kickstarter takes a 5% fee from funds raised; 100% of subsequent profits from a book go to the creator.

Gluejar won't be a publisher as the term is currently understood.  Gluejar will allow book lovers to pledge support for making books (that already exist) free to the world in a creative-commons licensed ebook edition. Authors retain commercial rights for print and other subsidiary rights. The price is set by the rights holder to match or exceed the income they would expect for future sales of the ebook; Gluejar takes a fee similar to Kickstarter's from funds raised.

Selection Process

Despite their slogan "Books are now in your hands", Unbound is using a selection process that's pretty much identical to how it already works. Book proposals will be carefully curated, and Unbound is only going to deal with submissions coming from literary agents. So if you're Monty Python's Terry Jones, great. I feel so empowered.

Kickstarter also reviews projects rather carefully to ensure quality. But anyone can propose a project, and it's clear from the projects on the site that it's relatively open to newcomers and nobodies with good ideas. It's really the crowd that decides what flies.

Gluejar will allow patrons to pick books for themselves. Although there are a huge number of books out there, you already know which ones you love. We're not sure how to extend the concept to new books or new authors.

Risks

Because Unbound acts as the publisher, supporters have a reasonable assurance that a completed project will actually deliver a book. On the downside, a book that has already been funded might turn out to be less than promised. The incentives encourage the author to split a narrative into multiple volumes, and if a book turns out to be bad, or perhaps just dull, the supporters don't get their money back. I don't know what Unbound means when it says that "All unused credits expire after 30 days."

Kickstarter doesn't do anything to assure that projects get completed. Supporters have to judge for themselves whether the creator is honest and worth supporting.

Gluejar will act as a trusted third party to make sure that good quality, Creative Commons editions are delivered to patrons of a successful pledge campaign. What Gluejar can't guarantee is that a rights holder with all the needed rights for relicensing a particular book will exist. That's why we'll let supporters spread their pledges onto lists of books.

Bottom Line

Unbound has launched with a very nicely done website. They've done a nice job of setting up reward levels and website features matched to book publishing. But Unbound is profoundly timid about putting publishing into the hands of the reader. It's more of a brilliant marketing gimmick than a publishing revolution; they've mapped out a healthy way to pre-sell an ebook for £10.


Thanks to @pablod, @julietalionetti and @muttinmall for a great discussion bringing out some of these issues.

Related articles

• Unbound Launches It's Kickstarter-Byliner Hybrid For Celebrity Authors (techcrunch.com)
• Hay Festival 2011: New site Unbound gives readers the power of publishing (telegraph.co.uk)
• New crowdfunded publishing project signs up major names (guardian.co.uk)

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Open Access eBooks, Part 3. Business Models for Creation

Here's the third section of my draft of a book chapter for a book edited by No Shelf Required's Sue Polanka. I previously posted the introduction; and What does Open Access mean for eBooks subsequent posts will cover Open Access E-Books in Libraries and a Conclusion. Note that while the blog always uses "ebook" as one word, the book will use the hyphenated form, "e-book". The comments on the second section prompted me to make significant revisions, which I have posted.

Business Models for Creation of Open Access E-Books

Any model for e-book publishing must have a business model for recouping the expenses of production: reviewing, editing, formatting, design, etc. In this section, we’ll review methods that can be used to support Open Access e-book publishing.

In 2009 Cory Doctorow put together a collection of short stories called “With a Little Help” and documented the process of publishing it in a series of columns on Publisher’s Weekly. He used a variety of business models to support the project, as detailed below, and the e-book version was released under a Creative Common License.

DIY publishing models

One way to meet the costs of e-book production is to keep those costs close to zero. Free blogging sites have made it simple for authors to produce blogs and other sorts of websites; additional tools are available to add keywords, links, and images. Other tools can convert a blog or similar website to the EPUB e-book format; EPUB export is available in Apple’s Pages word processor and it’s likely that other programs will soon follow suit.

Given these tools, authors can produce e-books on their own, with no other expense than the value of their time. For With a Little Help Doctorow did most of the production himself; as the title suggests, he got friends to help out with things such as cover and book design.

In the “Do It Yourself” or DIY model, there are essentially no expenses to recoup. If the author wants to earn something, additional money needs to be spent on an ISBN and a bit more to get metadata into a feed for Amazon. But if income is not the object, the e-book can simply be posted on a website and made available to the world. A CC license allows the e-books to be distributed in a wide variety of channels.

In fact, with the consent of the editor, this book chapter will be released as a DIY Open Access e-book in EPUB format, with a CC BY-ND license. The author hopes to profit primarily from the experience of doing so.

Freemium models

“Freemium” refers to the business model, common on websites, to offer one level of service for free, and then, when the user is solidly hooked on the use of the service, to offer them a premium level of service for a fee. The difficulty of this model is to have a service that’s attractive enough at the free level of service to drive premium conversions, and at the same time to have the free service be limited enough that upgrades deliver significant value.

In the e-book space, the traditional premium service is typically either the print version or an updated or otherwise enhanced digital edition. O’Reilly has used this model to great effect, by allowing authors to make free PDF versions available on websites while O’Reilly sells print versions through traditional channels.

In Doctorow’s project, he offered Print-on-demand versions through Lulu.com for $18 each, along with 250 “super-limited hardcovers” for $275 each: These were hand-bound on acid-free paper and included original paper “ephemera”, and came with a memory card with the full text of the book and audiobook. The $275 version turned out to be the big moneymaker.

As e-book readers become preferred over print by users, using print as a revenue engine may run out of steam. Bloomsbury Academic is building a platform that also uses e-book versions as the premium. While CC noncommercial versions are available for reading online, the books will also be issued for purchase in print and on Kindle and Sony readers. It’s possible that publishers will look at enhancing e-books with supplementary content or deep semantic mark-up as their revenue driver; a bare-bones Open Access version would serve as promotional vehicles for the core product.

Advertising and promotional models

Cost-free and Open-Access content can promote more than just a premium edition of the same content. E-Book formats are much like HTML web sites in that they can embed links; even javascript functionality is becoming available in e-book content. Publishers can use these types of functionality to generate revenue through advertising. A quick look at iPad or Android App Stores reveals a huge selection of free, advertising-supported Apps, including many apps that simply wrap e-book content.

In one scenario where this might happen, an author of a book series might produce an OA electronic version of the first in the series. The free e-book could have embedded links or “in-app purchase” buttons for subsequent books in the series. OA E-books might also be supported by contextual links and/or product placement; imagine a story featuring a sports car where the brand and model of the car are chosen based on support from a car company.

Another type of promotion that can be furthered by all types of free e-books is personal brand-building. It could be argued that Cory Doctorow’s biggest payoff from the With a Little Help project was that it increased his fame and thus his ability to make money on appearances, commissions, and on the Boing-Boing website. (One story in the collection was a $10,000 commission) Seth Godin

Public funding

Some books, such as those relating to education, public health, political or social advocacy, or scientific research, fulfill a public purpose. Publication of these books using a form of Open Access will further their public purpose. The costs of production and release of these-books can financed by foundations, charities, political action committees, private individuals, or governments.

European governments have joined together to fund the digitization and distribution of cultural heritage works through Europeana. Funded by the European Commission and national ministries of culture, Europeana acts as a portal enabling distribution of large numbers of OA e-books. In the US, books created by the federal government belong by law to the public domain, but there’s no centralized funding of OA e-books or their distribution.

In developing countries, governments seeking to provide textbooks to large numbers of student will eventually find that producing e-textbooks, released for free, is the only scalable method of providing for their national educational needs. Many states in India, for example, already release their state-published textbooks on an OA basis.

A variation on public funding for OA e-books in the context of academic monograph publishing has been proposed by Frances Pinter. Her idea is for libraries to join together in a cooperative, diverting a fraction of their acquisition budgets to fund the fixed costs of producing new monographs by university and commercial scholarly presses, which would then be made Open Access. She estimates that individual libraries could save over 75%, depending on the participation rate.

Another sort of public funding model with a long history of use is the “tip-jar”, or more profitably, the pay-what-you want model. Here, the creator urges his audience to leave some money as a “thank you” in return for value received. Doctorow reported receiving over $1200 using a Paypal-powered donation box, which actually did better than his print-on-demand offering.

Crowd-sourcing

Wikipedia and the more specialized wiki sites it has spawned are excellent examples of Internet resources created by large numbers of individuals working together virtually. These volunteer collaborations have replaced printed encyclopedias for most people, and might be considered to be the largest, most dynamic Open Access e-books in existence. Most users wouldn’t consider these websites to be books, even though the printed equivalents certainly were.

An organization called “Distributed Proofreaders” (DP) is an aggregation of volunteer effort clearly focused on e-books. Many of the digital texts in Project Gutenberg have been produced by DP volunteers who check and correct OCR transcriptions of scanned books. While OCR (optical character recognition) can be very accurate for modern books, books and magazines printed in the nineteenth century and earlier present a variety of challenges. The resulting digitized works are dedicated to the public domain.

Crowd-funding

The model that the author is working on at Gluejar Inc. is crowd funding. It’s analogous to the method that public radio and public television is funded in the U.S., except that every book that’s to be released with a Creative Commons license has a fund drive of its own. Once the producer’s price has been matched by reader pledges, an Open Access e-book is released. The pledge drives are managed by a website.

Authors have used crowd-funding websites such as kickstarter.com to cover the expenses of completing a new book. For example, Mur Lafferty raised over $19,000 from more than 250 backers to fund book design, cover design, and e-book conversion for a fantasy audio series. In a few cases, the projects use Creative Commons licenses. Stephen Duncombe, a Professor at NYU, has been trying to raise $3500 to fund the further production of an open-source version of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which is distributed with a CC BY-SA license. (Of course the underlying work is in the public domain, but the new translations, annotations, and commentary is subject to copyright.)

To get a better idea of how crowd-funding might scale to large numbers of books, consider the author of a romance series. Rights for the earliest books in the series have reverted to her, but there’s no cash to convert the book to e-book formats. She contacts the pledge-drive website, and enters an offer to release the first book under a Creative Commons license in exchange for a lump sum payment that she considers to be fair and which covers the conversion to e-book. Fans of the series can then go to the site and pledge support. If the author's offer price is met, supporters get billed, and the author gets the payment. The resulting e-book file is sent to all the people who have pledged, and put on a feed for the rest of the world to pick up. Since the e-book is now Creative Commons licensed, it can be redistributed for free.

In another scenario, a reader launches the pledge campaign, perhaps someone who has found the book in a library. The library metadata is pushed to the pledge-drive site and other fans can pledge their support. Eventually, the pledge amount gets big enough to attract notice from rights holders, who can then show up, deliver the e-book, and take the cash off the table and divide it among themselves.

Notes:

1. Cory Doctorow's With a Little Help Project
   
2. Bloomsbury Academic
   
3. Seth Godin's What Matters Now
   
4. Europeana
   
5. Distributed Proofreaders
   
6. Mur Lafferty's Kickstarter Project- The Afterlife Series: Heaven, Hell, Earth, Wasteland, War
   
7. Stephen Duncombe's Open Utopia project on Kickstarter:The Open Utopia: A New Kind of Old Book 

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