Change is coming. The major law school casebook publishers are working on game changers like eBooks and textbook rentals, while trying to do so unilaterally within the confines of standard form contracts designed for the 19th Century.
Textbook pricing is out of whack. Our students are paying outrageous prices. I am willing to consider how we can fairly take steps to reduce that financial impact, but not at the expense of gutting my royalty income.
Consider: Currently, a hugh slice of the price of a casebook goes to the local bookstore. But eBooks and textbook rentals marketed directly by the publisher could cut the local college bookstore out of the loop. So how does the share that used to go to the bookstore get divided between publishers and authors? Amazon pays ebook authors 70% royalties on "on sales of all electronic books priced between $2.99 and $9.99." Somehow I doubt that West or Foundation plan on being that generous.
Textbook rentals contemplate that the renting student pays a license fee and then has the option to return the book at the end of the semester or to buy it. If returned to the publisher, do authors get royalties on second or third rentals? If so, there's the potential for authors to do better than they do today, since we get no royalties on used book sales. But that assumes the rental prices are set intelligently and the royalty rates are set fairly.
Unfortunately, we have a collective action problem. Individual authors have little bargaining power. Collectively, we would wield considerable bargaining power, but there are huge obstacles to collective action on our part. As a result, we are all subject to huge pressure to accept unilateral changes imposed by the publisher even if the outdated form contract we signed 20 years ago doesn't remotely cover the situation.
We need to find ways for collective action. Blogs can get the word out. Individual authors can contact their publishers. Yet, I'd also like to see some sort of national collective action. Perhaps the AALS could schedule a conference between leading authors and the major publishers. Maybe we need a quasi-union, like the Author's Guild. Heck, maybe we need a real union, like the Writer's Guild.
Because if we don't do something soon, we're going to get run over in short order.
BTW: In response to Brian Leiter's crack about my achieving class consciousness, I've always supported the principle of unions. I just oppose what some unions are doing with their pension funds as corporate governance activists (frankly, I'd rather see them go back to funding the mob), the role public employee unions are playing in the growth of the state, and the thuggish tactics a few unions use in organizing and politics.