Hachette Rights Squable

Teleread.org is reporting that Hachette Book Group is pulling “all of its [e-book] titles from U.S. distributors” in a dispute over the issue of sales controls based on geographical territory.

"What’s happened is that U.S. distributors (Overdrive, Ingram Digital and Mobipocket) have not yet implemented systems to limit sales to assigned territories in a manner with which Hachette Livre (the French parent company of Hachette USA, formerly Time Warner books) is comfortable, likely creating contract issues with their European resellers and some of their authors.

“Without notice, Hachette instructed U.S. distributors (include French-based Mobipocket) to pull all ebooks from U.S. distribution over the weekend. Hachette and the distributors are working hard to resolve this. Meanwhile, our support email is getting a huge number of extra inquiries because of the Mobipocket error message and the Hachette action.

Teleread (David Rothman) also addresses the larger issues of DRM restrictions that could presage consumer frustration. "Will e-book DRM end up with a bewildering maze of territorial restrictions, just like DVDs?" One hopes not but is this representative of needlessly enforcing p-world realities on the e-book world?

Hopefully more news will be forthcoming on this issue.