Harlequin Romance has prevailed in a class action suit brought by three authors who accuse the book publisher of depriving writers who published books between 1990 and 2004 of their fair share of ebook revenue.<\/p>\n
In a ruling issued on Tuesday, a New York federal judge threw out the authors claim that Harlequin had used a corporate sleight-of-hand to pay them 3-4% of ebook royalties instead of the 50% they believed they were due.<\/p>\n
The case, which turned on technical questions of law, is an example of the collisions that can arise as a result of\u00a0book contracts signed in age that pre-dated the current boom in ebooks. (In another case <\/a>in the same court, parties are squawking over whether an author signed to a 1971 contract can shop ebook rights to another publisher.)<\/p>\n In the Harlequin case, the authors pointed to publishing contracts that granted them 50% of the digital royalties that the publisher collected.\u00a0The authors believe this should let them collect half of the $4 Harlequin earned from an ebook with a cover price of $8<\/p>\n Harlequin instead decided to pay 3-4% ($0.24 to $0.32 on an $8 book)\u00a0on the grounds that this was half of the 6-8% it received from licensing the rights to a different publisher.\u00a0The issue became contentious because the third party publishers in this case were subsidiaries created by Harlequin for tax purposes.<\/p>\n