Notebook (Posts about adhesion contract)/categories/adhesion-contract.atom2019-05-05T21:20:57ZToni MüllerNikolaOpen Letter To Authors: Please Choose Your Publisher With Care!/posts/open-letter-to-authors-please-choose-your-publisher-with-care/2012-12-14T13:17:00+01:002012-12-14T13:17:00+01:00Toni Mueller<div><p>Dear Author,</p>
<p>recently I had a discussion with a publisher where I asked for a
translation of a popular non-fiction book from English into German,
and offered to create it. The background for this discussion was that
there are certain works, which are most relevant to their field and
not easily, or even usefully, replaced, nor re-created, but which set
the "gold standard" in their respective fields. Re-doing such a work
is usually futile and amounts to throwing away the already-accumulated
knowledge, and makes it harder for people to quote a common reference
to each other. If only - in this example - an English language edition
of the book exists, one can expect that people with little command of
the English language will not benefit from such a book and, as a
consequence, may not get into the field covered by the book, have a
harder than necessary time acquiring proficiency, and/or may opt out
of the field completely, turning, or staying with possible alternative
technology, for which sufficient coverage in their native language is
being provided.</p>
<p>To return to the original topic, the publisher claimed that
maintaining translations was too much of a burden to them, but also
declined to support, or authorize, or sub-license, content in order
for me to create a translation. I can understand these arguments, as a
translation will either create cost, if the publisher does it himself,
or possibly (imho marginally) lost opportunity, if someone else
publishes a competing book - and a licensed translation is bound to
eat into the sales figures of the original book. So at first glance,
immediate greed suggest that such - let's say - "derivative works"
must be shot down.</p>
<p>However, I strongly disagree with this position, as I think <strong>the
general disemination of knowledge must not be artificially
restricted</strong>. In my opinion, the publisher does not only have a moral
obligation to satisfy obvious market demands, but that not doing so is
against the interests of both the original author of the book, as well
as the - in this case - user community at large, who are factually
excluded from a significant part of knowledge. The adverse effect on
the author is easy to see: His name will not be known as widely as it
could be, and his book sales will hit an upper bound rather sooner
than later, thus directly limiting his potential revenue. For the
users, the adverse effect is also obvious: Being cut off a knowledge
pool requires more investment into one's own research, thus driving up
cost for the topic covered in the book. And for the supplier side
(where I am located), this also creates a problem, as it impedes user
adoption and thus contributes to limiting the market share.</p>
<p>I therefore ask authors to please double-check your contracts, or the
contracts proposed to you, to either force the publisher to supply
translations upon request and in a timely manner, or to grant
reasonable licenses for third parties to create and publish such
translations, or to exclude translations from coverage, so you are
free to contract someone else to create such a translation if <strong>you</strong>
deem them to be useful, and in the event that publishers demand
complete control over your work, that you go with a different
publisher who does not require you to sign such an adhesion contract.</p>
<p>Thank you!</p></div>