Pat Conroy and His Books Enter the Digital Age

Author Pat Conroy is learning about digital books on the fly.  Among the country's most beloved writers, the 64-year-old Conroy hasn't allowed his distance from the digital world to keep him from joining it.

Much of his work is available electronically and four of his older books, including "The Prince of Tides" and "The Great Santini," are coming out this month through Open Road Integrated Media, a digital company co-founded a year ago by former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman and film producer Jeff Sharp.

Conroy is a good example of the divided state of electronic books. With standard contracts now including digital rights, e-editions of his recent works -- from "South of Broad" to a memoir out this fall, "My Reading Life" -- are handled by Random House, Inc., which also releases the bound versions.

Meanwhile, rights to his older books have shifted among outside companies.

The Open Road releases were first published by Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), but came out before the rise of e-books, when many contracts did not specifically cover rights to electronic editions.

"It's our goal to exercise, or obtain, all e-rights on our entire backlist, including the deep backlist, but in this instance we negotiated an agreed-upon separation of print from electronic, to our mutual satisfaction," Houghton Mifflin Harcourt spokeswoman Lori Glazer said in a statement.

Conroy and his agent, Marly Rusoff, both say the major appeal of Open Road was not royalties, although Open Road almost surely is offering more than the 25 percent most publishers give, but how the books would be packaged and promoted.

For several years, "Prince of Tides" was released through a licensing agreement with rival digital publisher, RosettaBooks. But after the Rosetta contract expired, Rusoff thought it better to try a new company.

Conroy says he doesn't involve himself deeply in e-book decisions, calling himself, good-naturedly, "one of those writers who's bullied by his agent, especially in this area." (Rusoff believes otherwise.)

At home with "the smell" and "the heft" of paper, he has no desire to read books on a screen, but accepts that others do.

"I imagine there will be paper books, at least until people like me die out," he says. "But I don't think there's any reason to worry about it.

E-books are the future and he realizes there is no need to fight it.