In the wee hours of the night, TeleRead reported that Hachette Book Group USA will remove “all of its titles from U.S. distributors,” while they sort out conflicting bookselling “sales controls” around the world.
Bob LiVolsi, founder of the digital bookseller BooksOnBoard, told TeleRead that digital book distributors must re-calibrate their agreements before they can resume selling e-books: “What’s happened is that U.S. distributors (Overdrive, Ingram Digital and Mobipocket) have not yet implemented systems to limit sales to assigned territories in a manner with which Hachette Livre (the French parent company of Hachette USA, formerly Time Warner books) is comfortable, likely creating contract issues with their European resellers and some of their authors.”
Digital book expert David Rothman worried that varying distribution rules could ultimately hurt the worldwide growth of the e-book: “territorial rights and related technology could turn out to be a major consumer issue in an era of global e-books. I’m all in favor of local editions. But will onerous tech requirements crimp international e-commerce in books?”