Barnes and Noble's New Nook Press Contract Terms

The Nook contract and Kindle contract are two that I will be discussing at my workshop on contracts at RT. If you attend, please drop by. Authors really need to know about this issue and a number of others in the contracts.

They haven't given me a time or location yet. I'll check with JoCarol and let you know.

I was going to say, if you read the Kindle contract, it contains pretty much the same clauses as the B&N one. Further, alot of those clauses are neccessary to conduct business. If they can't adjust the price, they can't sell your book worldwide. Nor can they price match. Nor can they discount. Etc... *shrugs* .. B&N is my breadwinner, my sales there are stronger than Amazon's even... I'm not about to abandon them because they have what has become industry standard language in their contract. IMHO.

Brindle Chase said:

I was going to say, if you read the Kindle contract, it contains pretty much the same clauses as the B&N one. Further, alot of those clauses are neccessary to conduct business. If they can't adjust the price, they can't sell your book worldwide. Nor can they price match. Nor can they discount. Etc... *shrugs* .. B&N is my breadwinner, my sales there are stronger than Amazon's even... I'm not about to abandon them because they have what has become industry standard language in their contract. IMHO.

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I don't think it's industry standard to leave the royalty rate out of the payment terms.

VanessaNorth said:

I don't think it's industry standard to leave the royalty rate out of the payment terms.

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Nook keeps the royalty scale in a separate area. I don't see how putting them directly in the terms, or referring those reading the terms to the published royalty table, changes from acceptable terms to heinous terms. IMHO... the royalties remain the same.

Her protest was about a dozen different things she didn't like about B&N's terms. Then hoodwinks the reader into believing only B&N has these terms. Then goes on to accuse B&N of trying to crush ebooks sales to boost print sales, even though the terms are from their self publishing division which no longer has any ties to its brick and mortar book stores or print copy online sales. They are separate companies now. Next, she steers her blog readers to abandon B&N to escape these horrible terms and go to Amazon instead.

Amazon has the same terms... So..

Basically, she's encouraging authors to surrender 30-35% of the market to escape terms that exist at all the other markets available anyway. It's non-sense IMHO. Give up a third of your book sales, yet endure the same terms anyway... what is she trying to accomplish here?

I'm not saying the terms at B&N are ideal, but her article is full of misinformation.