Dear Editor,
How unlikely, if unsurprising, that when The Author finally features an article about 'print-on-demand', it should be written by a publisher. And how delicious that the publisher chosen should be Michael Holdsworth of CUP, the very man who when I asked "do you inform your authors when they are being published in this way?" replied "why should we?" and who advised me to think of a single on-demand copy of a book as being just "an ultra-short run", thereby gifting me the title for my essay on the subject in the Times Literary Supplement of 18th June 1999.
Holdsworth writes , presumably with The Author's blessing:
"The industry-standard contract allows for the return of rights to the author when the work goes out of print. Self-evidently, with on-demand printing offering the prospect of 'eternal life', any such reversion may be deferred indefinitely."
This is certainly wrong. As I explained in detail in the TLS, should an author with a traditional contract who discovers that they are now being laser-printed on-demand or in short runs, want, for any reason, to enforce the reversion of their rights, they would at law be able to do so. This is what is truly self-evident, from their in-print clause's very existence. Pending a test-case therefore, unless publishers are prepared to reprint books properly, lithographically, taking the financial risk as envisaged when they were contracted, or they can persuade their authors to renegotiate terms, they notionally lose control of their backlists. No wonder they are so anxious to protest the 'eternal life' myth.
Holdsworth has another cause for anxiety too. By coincidence, in the same issue (Spring 2000, page 46), The Author reveals that in the past two years CUP has handed £700,000 of its profits to its university (£33 million over the past 12 years), despite the fact that in 1976 it was granted tax-exemption on condition that it would make no such donations, but plough any surpluses back into non-commercial publishing.
Yours sincerely, Andrew Malcolm (website address)
An Ultra Short Run and The War for Jericho (TLS articles)
Lightningsource.com (OUP's & CUP's licensed American On-Demand website, slogan: "the power of one", formerly LightningPrint)
Akme's collated list of OUP and CUP printed-on-demand authors and titles, together with a list of other participating publishers and various notes
P.o.D. postscripts including Bookseller articles of 14th & 28th July 2000
THUNDER BOLT HITS LIGHTNING SOURCE: "The Power of One" loses $15 million patent suit for "willful infringement", March 2004.