What is Paperight?
Paperight lets you sell instant, effortless print licences to businesses anywhere – from copy shops to colleges. They buy licences and get watermarked PDFs for printing at paperight.com. Their customers pay your licence fee and the outlet’s printing charge.
How does Paperight help me?
You get more publications to more people. Paperight turns any business with any printer into a print-on-demand bookstore, so you reach markets that conventional distribution can’t.
- Generate rights revenue in remote territories with no extra effort.
- Gather data about new markets, spotting interest in your products early and cheaply.
- Reduce your carbon footprint by cutting out unnecessary shipping.
- Make free excerpts and supplementary material easily accessible everywhere.
What can I earn?
You choose your rights fee per copy in dollars. (In line with most print-licensing deals, we recommend charging the equivalent of 5–15% of your conventional publication’s RRP. But it’s up to you.) Paperight keeps 20% of that – there are no other fees, no lock-in, and no exclusivity.
Of course, if you want to distribute publications for free, that’s great! Just set your rights fees as zero. We won’t charge you or the outlet anything.
Currently all rights payments are made via PayPal to publishers outside South Africa. We will be expanding our publisher-payment options soon. If PayPal receipts are not available in your country, let us know and we will try to make alternative arrangements.
What will customers pay in total?
An outlet’s customer pays the licence fee and the outlet’s print charges. Here’s an example in South African rand:
- Let’s say you publish The Beginner’s Guide to Potatoes. It costs R150 in conventional bookstores. It’s roughly A5 in size, and has 260 pages.
- After the retail discount, shipping and warehousing, and printing costs, you normally make R30 per copy. So, you decide to set your Paperight licence fee at R36, to make up a little for Paperight’s cut.
- The Paperight document that the outlet will print is A4, with your original A5 pages two-up on a side –130 sides. They print double-sided. So there are 65 sheets of paper.
- In South Africa, a common printing cost is 80c per double-sided sheet, black-and-white. So the printing charge is R52.
- The customer chooses to ring-bind the pages for an extra R15.
- So in total, the outlet charges the customer only R103 – a 30% saving on the conventional RRP. This includes the R36 licence fee, R52 for printing, and R15 for binding.
What will my publications look like?
We put your pages on A4 PDFs, one-up (sample PDF) or two-up (sample PDF) or both. Each page includes your name, the printing outlet’s name, the customer’s name, the date, and a unique tracking URL.
It’s up to the outlet and their customer whether to print in colour or not, and how to bind and finish the document.
What about my copyright?
You retain all existing copyright in your content. You’re only allowing Paperight outlets to acquire a very specific licence. Each time a registered outlet requests the right to print a publication that you are offering through Paperight, the outlet is granted a very limited licence to print the number of copies of the document requested. If an outlet does not comply with the licence terms, its account with Paperight will be suspended.
How will I get my publications to you?
For each publication, we need three things:
- A single PDF (include its identifier, such as the ISBN, in the file name)
- A front-cover or marketing image (high-resolution; include its identifier, such as the ISBN, in the file name)
- Information about the publication and pricing (metadata)
Enter the information in our easy, standard spreadsheet and mail it to us. If your metadata is already available by API, just let us know where to access it – then you only need to put the identifiers and rights fees on the spreadsheet, or include these in your feed. If you’re unsure, just ask.
Note: If you like, you can break your publications up into smaller, separate documents. This is useful if you want to sell individual chapters. Each document must have its own identifier and rights fees.
How do I sign up?
To sign up, read through the short, simple agreement below, fill in some basic details about your business, and click ‘Register’.
Agreement
By registering to distribute documents through Paperight, you’re accepting the terms of this agreement. It’s short and simple.
Definitions
Paperight is a service that lets publishers sell licences to registered outlets. These licences allow the outlets to print and sell copies of the Rightsholder’s documents, which Paperight provides to them as watermarked PDFs.
Scope
This agreement governs the relationship between Paperight and the Rightsholder. It may be amended by Paperight from time to time as the service develops. The Rightsholder will be informed at least 14 days before such changes take effect.
Term and termination
Either party may suspend or terminate this agreement by notifying the other in writing with 14 days notice. If that happens, outstanding earnings owed to the Rightsholder will still be paid according to the Compensation terms below. Watermarked documents may still be available to print through the Paperight system during the notice period.
Operating policies and procedures
The Rightsholder will provide documents to Paperight for distribution via paperight.com. For distribution to registered outlets, Paperight will resize these documents and place them on new page sizes (such as A4), along with fineprint containing selected details of each licence, including the names of the Rightsholder, the outlet, and the outlet’s customer, and the date of the licence. Paperight will conduct this service as it is described publicly on paperight.com, which will change from time to time at Paperight’s discretion.
Responsibilities of Rightsholder and Paperight
The Rightsholder is responsible for providing accurate metadata and up-to-date versions of its documents in the formats required by Paperight, or as agreed with the Rightsholder from time to time. Paperight is responsible for accurately reflecting this metadata on paperight.com, and for taking all reasonable measures to keep source (as opposed to public or purchased) metadata and documents safe from theft.
Compensation and currency
Paperight will pay earnings from licence sales to the Rightsholder once a month for sales up to the end of the previous month. If sales revenue is withheld by financial or regulatory processes (e.g. withholding amounts held by credit-card payment companies to cover chargebacks), earnings will be reduced accordingly until that revenue is actually received by Paperight.
Licences
When a registered outlet requests a copyright work (e.g. a book, journal or document) on paperight.com, they are automatically granted a license by the Rightsholder to reproduce and distribute the requested copyright works which the Rightsholder has made available through Paperight. The Rightsholder authorises Paperight to exercise any of the exclusive rights granted by law to the Rightsholder in order to enable Paperight to make the copyright works available to registered outlets in terms of this agreement, including but not limited to reproduction, distribution and transmission of the works.
Warranty disclaimer and limitation of liability
All services provided by Paperight are provided on an “as-is” basis. Paperight does not warrant that the services will be uninterrupted or error free.
Paperight’s total liability to the Rightsholder for any damages (regardless of why the Rightsholder seeks damages) shall not exceed in total the revenue received by Paperight from rights sales of the Rightsholder’s content in the month before the incident giving rise to the liability.
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, in no event will Paperight or the Rightsholder, their parents, subsidiaries or affiliates, or any of their officers, directors, employees or agents be liable for punitive, consequential, incidental, exemplary, indirect or special damages, including without limitation damages for loss of profits, revenues, business, use, data or other intangibles, whether or not such damages were foreseeable – and even if Paperight or the Rightsholder had been advised of the possibility or likelihood of such damages.
The Rightsholder acknowledges that due to the nature of the internet, and despite Paperight’s best reasonable efforts, some licences may be sold, and related content delivered, in geographic territories for which the Rightsholder and/or Paperight do not have rights to sell such licences. The Rightsholder therefore waives any claim for damages against Paperight for licences sold to outlets in geographic territories for which either party may not have rights.
Indemnity
The Rightsholder warrants that it is the owner of, or is authorized to licence, the rights to all content provided to Paperight. This content (a) is not libellous, slanderous, defamatory, obscene or pornographic; (b) does not infringe on anyone else’s intellectual property or other rights, such as their privacy; (c) does not violate applicable laws or regulations; (d) does not contain any harmful or malicious computer code. The Rightsholder will defend, indemnify and hold harmless Paperight, its parent, subsidiaries and affiliates, and their officers, directors, employees, and agents against any third-party claims arising from a breach of this warranty.
Paperight will defend, indemnify and hold harmless the Rightsholder, its parent, subsidiaries and affiliates, and their officers, directors, employees, and agents against any third-party claims caused by Paperight’s negligence in distributing content, unless those claims arise from the negligence or willful misconduct of the Rightsholder.
If either party claims this indemnification, they will give the other prompt notice in writing; cooperate in any investigation and defence; let the other party select its own legal counsel; and not settle any claims without the other’s consent.
Force Majeure
If either party cannot fulfil its obligations because of an event beyond their reasonable control (including any act of God, actions by any government authority, fires, floods, natural disasters, riots, wars, labour problems such as lockouts and strikes, or communications systems failures), any delay or failure will be excused until circumstances permit business to continue as before. This does not apply to obligations to pay money due.
Assignment
Should either party intend to transfer this Agreement or any of its rights and obligations to another party, they will inform the other party with at least 14 days notice, so that they may have an opportunity to review or terminate the Agreement. After transfer, this Agreement will be binding on any successors and assigns. Written notice is not required where Paperight or the Rightsholder assigns all or most of its assets to another party, in which case the acquiring party assumes all of the rights and obligations in this agreement.
Governing law
If there are any disputes between the parties, they will be governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa.
Happy with that Agreement? If you are, please fill in your information below and click ‘Register’. (If not, let us know why. We love feedback.)
