Why Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca isn’t in the Kindle store

Why Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca isn’t in the Kindle store

I often see questions in the Amazon Kindle community about why a particular book isn’t available in the Kindle store. 

I have to admit a little amusement when the book is described as a classic…and was published well after I was born.  Weren’t all classics published at least fifty years before you were born?  😉

There are some standard answers, and some famous cases where we know the author…um…hasn’t embraced e-books (J.K. Rowling and Ray Bradbury, to name two).

Recently, the question came up about Daphne Du Maurier’s book Rebecca.

It’s actually one of the most wanted books for the Kindle, as reported by

eReaderIQ*

It’s number four on the list, behind two Harry Potters and To Kill a Mockingbird.

I thought it might be illustrative to go through this particular example to look at some of the issues.

Copyright status

This is the first question, and usually the most important.  When an author writes a book, that author has control over the reproduction and sale of that book (within certain limitations). 

The author then traditionally licenses those rights to a publisher.  The publisher has the marketing knowledge and organization, in addition to other things.  The author is given a percentage (“royalty”) for each copy sold.

I’m keeping this simple…there are a lot of possibilities.  🙂

The publisher pays for specific rights for a specific market.  For example, one publisher might buy the hardback rights for Canada.  Another one might buy the audiobook rights for Australia, and so on.

Any rights not purchased stay with the author…or after the author’s death, the author’s estate.

In the USA (and in most parts of the world) copyrights have a limited term**.  When that term runs out, the author or the author’s estate no longer owns the rights.  They belong to the public at that point…they fall into what is called the “public domain”.

When a book is in the public domain, no royalties need to be paid, no permission needs to be obtained.  Anybody can publish the book in any format, make derivative works (like movies) out of it, even change it however they want (which has been in the news lately, with a group that plans to publish altered versions of some of Mark Twain’s works).

When a popular book falls into the public domain, there is a pretty good chance it will become an e-book.  That might be done by a non-profit, such as the laudable

Project Gutenberg

or it could be by someone who chooses to sell it and make a profit for the work they did digitizing the book.  That’s perfectly legal. 

So, my first question when someone asks why a book isn’t in the Kindle store is whether it is in the public domain or not.  If it is, there is a good chance it will show up (if it was popular).

How do I determine that?

Initially, I know the basic rules, although they can get complicated.  If the book was first published in the USA prior to 1923, it is in the public domain…in the USA.  I need to find out where it was published and when.

I usually just go to Wikipedia for this.

In the case of Rebecca, it was first published in 1938 in the UK.

It gets a bit more complicated for books first published outside the US…you can only count on books published before July 1, 1909 as being public domain throughout the US. 

So, it wasn’t going to automatically be in the public domain.

My next stop is

Public Domain Sherpa

which is a wonderful site with a copyright calculator…you can put information in about a book, and tell if it is probably public domain.  I recommend it.

Sometimes, I have to guess at the information for the calculator.  With Rebecca, I assume it was published with the proper formalities, and renewed when the opportunity arose (since the commercial potential would be apparent).

If that’s the case, the book would have 95 years of copyright protection (in the USA).  1938+95=2033, so it would fall into the public domain in 2034.

At that point, we’d certainly get it as an e-book…if the copyright laws don’t change.  Copyright term has been periodically getting longer.

However, there are probably books published in 1938 still under copyright that are available.

In those cases, the rights for the e-book would have been licensed from the author or the author’s estate.

My next step, then, is to see if the author is still alive.  That may mean that the author could still license those rights, or I might need to see if they’ve stated an objection to e-books.

Daphne Du Maurier died in 1989.

That means it is very unlikely that e-book rights were negotiated while she was alive.  E-book rights were generally not negotiated before about 2005.  Sometimes, people try to license the rights for “all future technologies” or some such, but I believe those are generally not upheld.  How could someone reasonably know what the e-book rights are going to be worth…before there are even EBRs (E-Book Readers)? 

So, if Daphne Du Maurier died before e-book rights would have been negotiated, and the book is still under copyright, who can license that right?

The author’s estate.

As you probably know, estate situations can be messy. People may fight over the rights.   Even when it’s not, there may not be anyone around to speak for the book…no one with whom to negotiate.

That last situation is called an “orphan book”.  There is a lot of money being lost because there are books that are still under copyright, but can’t be turned into e-books (or even published as paperbooks, if there isn’t a current contract).  There is “orphan book” legislation under consideration to remedy that situation…but currently, if you can’t get someone to sign off on your e-book project, you just can’t do it legally.

If there is someone speaking for the Du Maurier estate, you can bet they’ve been approached by publishers.  They could be holding off, thinking the market isn’t mature enough yet.  They could be weighing offers.  Or, they just might not care.  😉

The question came up about audiobooks of Rebecca.  Well, Books on Tape started in the mid-1970s, and audiobooks were a serious part of the market before Du Maurier died.  Rights had probably been negotiated.

One other thing: licenses are contracts…they can be done however both parties agree, pretty much.  The author could sell a paperback license to one company, a hardback license to another company, and so on.  The license for different markets (usually countries) could be sold separately.  The license might be for a limited time: maybe they revert to the author after five years or ten years.

I hope that makes the rights situation clearer.  As the market grows, the incentive to license those rights gets bigger.  There will also be more motivation for some sort of orphan books legislation.

Books are being added very quickly (something like 1,000 a day in the US store).  That may accelerate.  There seems to me to be a lot of things to read, but I’m an eclectic reader.  If the book you want isn’t available, you might want to consider trying something else.  Eventually, though, we should see pretty much everything as an e-book.

* http://www.ereaderiq.com has a free service where you can sign up to get an e-mail notification when the book appears for the first time in the Kindle store

** I wrote what turned out to be a controversial post looking at the idea that perhaps copyright should be permanent

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

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