Publishing trade mag Quill & Quire online (paywalled) reports that University of Toronto Press is so keen to digitize its backlist and do it cheap that it will even destroy its last copy of particular works rather than pay for non-destructive scanning.
But the key to the initiative is the press's request that authors accept a reduction in their digital royalty share from 50% to 10%. As long as there were no digital sales, that is, UTP was willing to share the revenues equally. But now that there is revenue potential....
Think of the costs to the press of buying paper, printing, binding, shipping, warehousing all those backlist books in paper form: substantial. Think of the costs to the press of delivering a digital file: tiny.
UTP reports most of its authors are rolling over for this. Course, their authors are mostly profs, who can be as innocent as babes about their rights.
