Don't Publishers Have an Obligation to Tell Authors They're Publishing?

While going through the claiming process in the Google Books settlement (if you’re an author, you should do so too–by tomorrow!–so you get royalties if they sell your stuff, or can opt out), I discovered that my very first book, co-authored with a well-known NYC literary agent and a subject-matter expert, had been published as a paperback in the UK, by a different company, the same year the American hardback edition came out.

The book was published 29 years ago, and I never knew this. I wrote to my literary agent co-author, and he didn’t know about it either.

And a few years ago, I discovered that the publisher of my third book, published in 1993, had quietly put it back into print as an on-demand title, meaning they print one when someone orders it. Again, I was not told. In that case, I was pretty sure I’d gotten a reversion of rights, but the paperwork seems to have been lost when I moved in 1998. In that case, I was deeply opposed to putting the book back in print because I had actually written a much more comprehensive and more recent book. But since I couldn’t locate the note I’d received several years earlier, I couldn’t do much about it.

Don’t authors have rights in these situations? Shouldn’t a publisher be obligated to not only notify an author but actually obtain consent? Grrrr!