12 Aug 2010 12:38:33
As for Pat Conroy e-books it is a new wave in technology, but he didn’t now a lot of about them, that is why he believes that his work could be downloaded until a fan showed him during a recent promotional tour.
Among the country's most beloved writers, the 64-year-old Conroy hasn't allowed his distance from the digital world to keep him from joining it. It is very good that more and more works of the Pat Conroy become available to download electronically and four of his older books, including "The Prince of Tides" and "The Great Santini," are coming out this month — starting Tuesday — through Open Road Integrated Media, a digital company co-founded a year ago by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman and film producer Jeff Sharp. It is great that industry of e-books become popular.
Now, we can say, that Conroy is a good example of the author who divided state of electronic books. He has got digital rights, and he prepare new works like "South of Broad" to a memoir out this fall, "My Reading Life" — are handled by Random House, Inc., which will be available in electronically format.
The Open Road releases were first published by Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), but came out before the rise of e-books, when many contracts did not specifically cover rights to electronic editions.
"It's our goal to exercise, or obtain, all e-rights on our entire backlist, including the deep backlist, but in this instance we negotiated an agreed-upon separation of print from electronic, to our mutual satisfaction,"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokeswoman Lori Glazer said in a statement.
Conroy and his agent, Marly Rusoff, both say the major appeal of Open Road was not royalties, although Open Road almost surely is offering more than the 25 percent most publishers give, but how the books would be packaged and promoted.
But in spite of popularity of e-books, Pat Conroy think:
"I imagine there will be paper books, at least until people like me die out," he says. "But I don't think there's any reason to worry about it.
"I remember talking to my grandparents when I was a little kid and they both told me about the first time they had seen an airplane and the first time they had seen an automobile and they both would say, `This'll never work.' But that's how progress works. That's how the future happens."
Among the country's most beloved writers, the 64-year-old Conroy hasn't allowed his distance from the digital world to keep him from joining it. It is very good that more and more works of the Pat Conroy become available to download electronically and four of his older books, including "The Prince of Tides" and "The Great Santini," are coming out this month — starting Tuesday — through Open Road Integrated Media, a digital company co-founded a year ago by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman and film producer Jeff Sharp. It is great that industry of e-books become popular.
Now, we can say, that Conroy is a good example of the author who divided state of electronic books. He has got digital rights, and he prepare new works like "South of Broad" to a memoir out this fall, "My Reading Life" — are handled by Random House, Inc., which will be available in electronically format.
The Open Road releases were first published by Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), but came out before the rise of e-books, when many contracts did not specifically cover rights to electronic editions.
"It's our goal to exercise, or obtain, all e-rights on our entire backlist, including the deep backlist, but in this instance we negotiated an agreed-upon separation of print from electronic, to our mutual satisfaction,"Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokeswoman Lori Glazer said in a statement.
Conroy and his agent, Marly Rusoff, both say the major appeal of Open Road was not royalties, although Open Road almost surely is offering more than the 25 percent most publishers give, but how the books would be packaged and promoted.
But in spite of popularity of e-books, Pat Conroy think:
"I imagine there will be paper books, at least until people like me die out," he says. "But I don't think there's any reason to worry about it.
"I remember talking to my grandparents when I was a little kid and they both told me about the first time they had seen an airplane and the first time they had seen an automobile and they both would say, `This'll never work.' But that's how progress works. That's how the future happens."
