TW to agents: give us European rights or bust

The Bookseller reports that Time Warner UK has been getting mighty pissed off to find that American editions are flooding bookstores in Ireland and the UK from other European countries, and they want to do something about it:

Chief executive and publisher Ursula Mackenzie said TW recently found a number of US editions of its books in Ireland and asked for them to be removed. Although booksellers complied, legally they did not have to do so, as Europe’s open market allows anything legally imported into any part of Europe to be passed on to anywhere else in Europe, including the UK.

Mackenzie said: “I am not issuing a threat–every contract is individual. But I wanted to raise my head above the parapet and point out to agents that this is an issue which is going to become pressing, and if we want to protect the UK we have to be very careful. We don’t want the whole of the English-speaking world to become an export territory for America.”

I have a special radar for rights issues since I’ve spent the last week or so loitering in bookstores back in my Canadian hometown. There is no country more confused about which edition to stock than this, as some books fall under North American rights (US/Canada) and others under Commonwealth (Canada/UK), and others still all by their lonesome thanks to Canadian publishers. All well and good, as it should, but in an age of growing globalization, I’d imagine rights are going to become even stickier since technically, anyone can order any edition over the worldwideinterweb.

And as it happens, Carole Blake commented to that effect in Publishing News’ take on the story: “What they’re asking for is fine, as long as Time Warner US will still buy the book from us, without Europe. It may well be that Canada will be used as a bargaining tool: in other words, the US doesn’t have Europe, but it gets Canada. But obviously, agents like to sell to Canada themselves.”

But that doesn’t stop some folks from being blissfully naive, like Penguin international sales director Mike Bryan, who says that publishers concerned about rights infringements should ask the US publisher “to confirm they won’t sell it into your markets.” Uh, right…

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