From BISG:

THE KEY TO FUTURE PROFITS

In today’s ever changing business climate, publishers are being forced to respond more quickly and more efficiently in all aspects of their business. An area of increasing importance is rights management.

While book sales are becoming more and more elusive, rights are becoming an increasing piece of the revenue mix as opportunities to sell licenses of content fragments for websites, apps and derived books continue to rise. Unfortunately, many publishers are struggling to respond to these growing number of requests due to inefficient systems and processes that are costly in time and money. Now more than ever, publishers will need to find ways to extract the maximum revenue from their intellectual property with minimum effort.

Learn more at this year’s Making Information Pay conference as our rights experts discuss the need for efficient rights management tools and processes across the industry. The presentation will include:

• Revealing results from BISG’s New Rights Management Survey of Publishers and Vendors
• An examination of the risks of poor rights management and the importance of proper taxonomy
• A summary of next steps toward an industry-wide solution

Our rights panel will feature the following speakers:

Heather Reid
Director of Data Systems and Services
Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)

David Marlin
President and Co-Founder,
MetaComet Systems and
Co-Chair of BISG Rights Committee

Mike Shatzkin
Founder & CEO,
Idea Logical Company

For more information, visit the BISG Website.

David Marlin, President of the leading Royalty Management software company MetaComet Systems, will be speaking on May 26th 2010 at Book Expo America in New York City. The session is titled: “Rights, Royalties & Retailers: What Works?”

For more information, please visit the BEA Conference website.

MetaComet President David Marlin participated in one of the most talked about presentations at Book Expo America. Marlin focused on the changing nature of rights, and the new opportunities to monetize content. Read all about it in Publisher’s Weekly: “Publishing for the Age of Abundance“.

SOUTH HADLEY, MA – MetaComet Systems announced a partnership with startup publisher Quartet Press today. The agreement marked an unmatched milestone for MetaComet in rights and royalties management — the ultimate flexibility and scalability to handle rights and royalties management for publishers of all sizes, including the world’s largest publishers to startups.

“Our Web-Hosted offering has become the fastest growing part of our business,” said David Marlin, President of MetaComet Systems, which offers the Royalty Tracker royalty software. “In fact, we prefer our clients to let us handle all of the IT issues by choosing our Web-Hosted platform. Quartet represents some of the most forward thinkers in the industry, so we are honored that they looked to us to handle their rights and royalties management.”

Quartet also announced it partnered with Firebrand Technologies to handle title management.

“Our partnerships with Firebrand and MetaComet are essential to our core mission: making sure our books are easily found by readers while ensuring our authors are paid in a timely, accurate manner,” comments Quartet co-founder, Kassia Krozser. “We understand the difficulty of getting information to vendors, receiving data from sales outlets, and reporting to authors. The Firebrand and MetaComet systems allow us to achieve our goals.”

About MetaComet® Systems

MetaComet – home to the internationally acclaimed Royalty Tracker® — provides the world’s leading Royalty Software solutions for tracking royalties and rights, royalties processing and Royalty Management. MetaComet’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution can be tailored to meet each customer’s need. Founded in 2001 with a focus on book publishing, MetaComet now provides solutions to content providers in books, music and digital content. For more information, call 413-536-5989, ext 210, or visit us on the Web at www.MetaComet.com.

About Quartet Press
Quartet Press was founded on shared principles to create a high-quality, community-centric, and reader- and author-friendly digital publishing house. First titles will be available in Fall 2009 through its Quench Romance imprint.

About Firebrand Technologies
Founded in 1987 as Quality Solutions, Inc., Firebrand Technologies provides steadfast leadership and seamless information flow throughout the entire publishing process. Today, its Title Management Solutions facilitate tracking titles from pre-acquisition through post-production, freeing up staff to focus on their creative specialties. Its Eloquence Metadata Solutions are the fastest, easiest, most accurate, and most cost-effective way to implement ONIX to increase sales and improve communications throughout a publication’s lifecycle. In an increasingly digital world, its eCommerce Solutions help deliver sales across new channels. For more information visit: http://www.firebrandtech.com/

SOUTH HADLEY, MA – A Rights Registry combined with clear and streamlined rights agreements would help fuel future growth for the publishing industry, argued MetaComet Systems’ President David Marlin, in a piece featured prominently by Publishers Weekly today. A registry and rights standards would enable the widest possible dissemination of content while enabling publishers to keep pace with content delivery innovation. the industry needs it for the widest possible dissemination of content.

As the recognized industry expert in royalty software and rights and royalties management, MetaComet was encouraged to write the article for PW.

“I spend my days steeped in rights, royalties and the contracts that govern them, and this much is clear: publishers must plan new approaches to rights or risk future viability,” Marlin wrote. “Regardless of how the courts or the Justice Department treat the Google Book Settlement, the Book Rights Registry (BRR) will exist in some form; the industry needs it for the widest possible dissemination of content. A registry combined with clear and streamlined rights agreements would help publishers keep pace with content delivery innovations.”

See the entire PW article by clicking here.

About MetaComet® Systems

MetaComet – home to the internationally acclaimed Royalty Tracker® — provides the world’s leading web-hosted Royalty Software solutions for tracking royalties and rights, royalties processing and Royalty Management. MetaComet’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution can be tailored to meet each customer’s need. Founded in 2001 with a focus on book publishing, MetaComet now provides solutions to content providers in books, music and digital content. For more information, call 413-536-5989, ext 210, or visit us on the Web at www.MetaComet.com.