ABSTRACT
The range of rights that can be licensed has continued to expand over the years, reflecting wider trading between different countries as political and economic circumstances change, new channels of book supply and the development of new technologies with potential for exploiting the written word in a variety of ways – the all-pervasive influence of the internet, the increasing importance of social networking sites now dominated by Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as well as sites such as YouTube (video material), Flickr (photos), Tumblr (blogging) and SecondLife, and the advent of new platforms and new forms of publication such as e-books and downloadable audiobooks, are probably the most significant developments in the last 25 years. On the other hand, some more traditional areas of licensing have contracted, in particular the licensing of paperback rights to independent licensees (now largely replaced by vertical publishing within the same group); book club rights (whose importance has dwindled in the face of discounting by traditional booksellers, supermarkets and online retailers); first serial rights (affected by a reduction in newspaper advertising revenue and their move to online publication), and to some extent the granting of low-price reprint rights (replaced in some markets by direct supply of the original publisher’s own edition at a special price). With the increasing number of multinational publishing groups, intercompany licensing continues to expand. In the past, rights attaching to literary works were often divided for
the sake of convenience into volume rights and subsidiary rights, but these distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred, particularly with the diverse forms of electronic publishing and licensing.
