Random House Pushes Out of Print Definition

A reader forwarded an email she got about new problems with Random House contracts:

Society of Authors deputy general secretary Kate Pool said her major concern with RHG's new boilerplate was an out-of-print clause allowing rights reversion only if the publisher cannot supply a physical or electronic copy of a book within a month, or if there have been no royalty earnings for a year. The author body plans to raise the issue with RHG.

Pool said: "Random House could long since have given up actively publishing your book, it could have sold one copy a year for the past three years, and take three weeks to produce a print-on-demand copy, but you can't terminate the contract. We can see e-books are another way of reaching readers, and that print on demand for old titles has advantages, but this is a way that publishers can sit on rights for years on end."

As the information was from an article in the Bookseller, it referred to English authors. However, that doesn't mean that Random House isn't doing the same in the US. The publisher is apparently also pushing for more aggressive "high discount" provisions. Although there aren't enough details to tell, my guess is that the company is trying to set high discount provisions, which are a trigger for significantly lower royalties to authors, at levels that would be far more easily hit.

I'm not a member of the Authors' Guild (though I keep meaning to join) - anyone hear anything similar from AG about Random House in the US?