Publishers and magazines have asked for electronic rights, sometimes for a small fixed price, sometimes for free. The electronic era raises several issues for SF writers. The most immediately important in economic terms are those of our rights to our own material. In electronic distribution, the unchanged text of the book or an image of its unchanged pages is stored and distributed electronically. In many ways electronic distribution resembles traditional publishing, but with radically lowered printing and storage costs and minimal penalties for keeping the book in print.
Publishers can do the same thing, making their backlist potentially more valuable.
The relationships between pieces of text are no longer the same relationships as those between pages or chapters of a book. Pieces of text are linked. Creating an electronic version of a book can be as simple as adding links or, because of multimedia additions and programming, it can become extremely complex and costly. It is unlikely that a contract written today can determine what rights can be economically exploited in the future, how valuable those rights will be, or what company will be in the best position to exploit them. Writers should protect their equity in their creative work by retaining these rights, as they retain movie rights, until they can sell them in the expectation of a profit.