• This is the last piece of a four-part publication that will enlighten the future of books

Since the internet, the publishing industry has faced new issues in all the value chains. Although copyrights have always been a source of challenges, the recent arrival of prosumers in the book sector has brought further questions to the table of content. How can we better protect authors and their work? How can prosumers be recognised as assets for the publishing sector? Which business models can help publishers to embrace this new figure? Right now, Möbius is working on finding some solutions.   

Words can be compelling sometimes if you want to keep them for yourself. Don’t you remember as a teenager, fulfilling, with joy and tears, notebooks with quotes from your favourite authors? For you, it was a world, your world. As time passes, you reread your notes, and those words do not mean the same, but they surely touch some deep feelings. Although Barthes (1968) argued that the author’s death must pay for the reader’s birth, those words were once thought. The author spent hours struggling to find the correct sentence to portray a particular character, reveal a landscape from some part of an imaginative world, or depict a daily memory. As Virginia Woolf well described it, the writer gives himself entirely to creating a narrative that will let the reader be immersed in a unique story: “Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written largely in his works” -extract from Virginia Woolf’s diary for 13 April 1930. 

The new paradigm: internet and the thousand and one ways of making money   

Technology and the internet have given a new impetus to the publishing sector since the beginning of the new millennium. The Kindle, an Amazon reader tablet, entered every home fifteen years ago giving the reader new ways to explore the world of literature. The digitalization of books has also brought innovative experiments for readers and authors involving the appearance of online platforms such as Wattpad, AO3, Fanfiction.net, and Tumblr. Suddenly, everyone can create and share literary content with readers worldwide, and the print environment’s barriers are getting almost invisible. For publishers, multiple opportunities to enlarge their business models are made available with the internet. Furthermore, all other traditional publishing value chain members can transform their services to embrace new roles in the digital environment.  

What about copyrights in such a context? Emircan Karabuga, a legal researcher at the CiTiP KU Leuven and a member of the Möbius consortium have listed the copyrights issues: “The main copyright issues that the publishing industry face include ensuring effective enforcement of copyright in the analogue and digital world, having feasible rights clearance mechanisms, ensuring fair remuneration for rightsholders, allocating copyright (co)-ownership of literary works, having a better understanding of copyright liability rules concerning direct and indirect copyright infringements, and having more transparency regarding exceptions and limitations to copyright.”  

Undoubtedly, books must be protected as much as their authors and get adapted to the digital setting. Recently, the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM), the EU copyright’s rules, have been adapted to new consumer behaviours by providing new principles on a variety of issues, including copyright limitations and exceptions, extended collective licensing, preservation of cultural heritage, use of out-of-commerce works, ensuring fair remuneration for authors, and copyright liability of online platforms. The KU Leuven researcher explains that most of these principles are very useful for providing added guidance for the stakeholders of the book publishing industry. Still, he warns about the possible negative impact on the book publishing industry of giving a new liability regime for certain online platforms (Article 17 of the CDSM Directive). 

What Möbius will do to revolutionise the protection of authors and books

One of Möbius‘s solutions will elucidate critical aspects of cross-sectoral and cross-border collaborations, particularly copyright and content restrictions. Indeed, fan fiction as a form of creative expression may occasionally be deemed to break third parties’ copyright (Schwabach, A, 2016). In response to the blurry situation in which the publishing sector can now be involved, the EU copyright law framework expert explains that a comprehensive report is drafted for Möbius. It is based on the three main implications of making literary content available through emerging digital prosumer business models in the book publishing industry: “First, we addressed the issue of copyright ownership, namely determining who is entitled to benefit from the exclusive rights granted. Second, we assessed the notion of copyright exploitation which refers to the use of exclusive rights included in copyright by third parties. Finally, we analysed the issue of copyright liability arising from providing online prosumer business models that facilitate literary content creation and making available”.

This is how Möbius will provide new business opportunities by characterising new prosumer business models and analysing their feasibility and market potential across sectors and borders. 

Written by Marjorie Grassler, EU Projects Communication Executive at Mobile World Capital Barcelona.