by Joseph T. Sin­clair

Remem­ber the good old days when we could buy a dig­i­tal type­face (font) or col­lec­tion for a rea­son­able price and didn’t have to wor­ry about any­thing? Going back 25 years I shelled out $50 here and $50 there (typ­i­cal­ly for a col­lec­tion of 20 to 30 fonts), even $200 once, for a impres­sive col­lec­tion of fonts which I have used rou­tine­ly for print­ing books, newslet­ters, reports, brochures, busi­ness cards, office doc­u­ments, and the like for all these years. It nev­er occurred to me that I couldn’t use such fonts for any­thing and every­thing. It was under­stood that buy­ing the font was for the pur­pose of unlim­it­ed pub­lish­ing.

Today it’s a new ball­game. With the recent advent of smart­phones, tablets, book apps, ebooks, and com­mer­cial PDF pub­lish­ing, there are sud­den­ly many more ways to use fonts that may or may not be cov­ered by the old licens­ing under which we bought the fonts for print pub­lish­ing. And we’ll nev­er know what our orig­i­nal licens­ing pro­vi­sions were. Who keeps the licens­ing documents—especially for 25 years?

It’s time to start over, pay again, and pay for each use. Here are some of the prob­a­ble uses (in addi­tion to print) requir­ing an appro­pri­ate license:

• Embed­ded in web­sites using the @font func­tion of CSS 3

• Embed­ded in each web­site

• Embed­ded in ebooks

• Embed­ded in each ebook

• Embed­ded in each ezine

• Embed­ded in book apps

• Embed­ded in each book app

• Embed­ded in soft­ware

• Embed­ded in each pro­gram

• Embed­ded in PDFs

• Embed­ded in each PDF

• Embed­ded in a serv­er

For all of the above the cost may depend on the traf­fic (e.g., web­site), the vol­ume pub­lished (e.g., book apps), or the dura­tion (e.g., one year). There might be a dif­fer­ent price for each or a price that cov­ers cer­tain group­ings (e.g., ebooks and PDFs).

For many fonts, just under­stand­ing the pric­ing is a chal­lenge. For instance, if you pub­lish a book as an ebook, the font is usu­al­ly rea­son­ably priced. But if you pub­lish the book as a bookapp (a book in an app for­mat) instead, it usu­al­ly comes under the “embed­ded in soft­ware” cat­e­go­ry which is typ­i­cal­ly priced very high (e.g., up to thir­ty times – 30x – the price of ebook embed­ding) thus pun­ish­ing those who pub­lish infor­ma­tion in such a form.

If you buy a font cost­ing $300 (10x the desk­top font) for using in bookapps (treat­ed as soft­ware), it might cov­er all the bookapps you pub­lish, or you might have to pay a roy­al­ty for each title or each year. And what have we been talk­ing about? Just one type­style of one type­face (one font). Typ­i­cal­ly we use four type­styles (four fonts) of each type­face. Thus, to use one type­face (text) with four type­styles in a book app could cost $1,200 for each title @10x (or as much as $3,600 @ 30x). Throw in a dif­fer­ent font for head­ings, and the fare goes up even more. This is a tough sell for font mak­ers to make.

But that’s not the worst. After all, it’s only mon­ey. The worst is under­stand­ing and keep­ing track of the licens­ing agree­ments. Most licens­ing agree­ments are incom­pre­hen­si­ble. Just when you think you’ve under­stood the licens­ing for using the font one way, three months or three years lat­er you want to use it anoth­er way; and you can’t fig­ure out whether you’re cov­ered or have to buy the font again. In many cas­es, you can’t even get prices for some ordi­nary uses with­out con­tact­ing the font mak­er for spe­cial pric­ing. And don’t think that at one web­site oper­at­ed by one font mak­er that all the licens­ing agree­ments are the same (as you might expect). They may vary wide­ly from font to font.

And what about the colophon? A colophon has been used in print­ed books to inform the world about the typo­graph­i­cal aspects of one’s book design—to give cred­it to typog­ra­phers. With the uncer­tain legal­i­ties of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing, the colophon becomes an invi­ta­tion to lit­i­ga­tion. It’s not some­thing you will want to include in a dig­i­tal book.

The bot­tom line is that using fonts for dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion pre­sen­ta­tions is a legal night­mare, not to men­tion in many cas­es it entails com­par­a­tive­ly out­ra­geous pric­ing. When I call it a legal night­mare, I am under­stat­ing the case because there are addi­tion­al issues I haven’t cov­ered in this post.

What is one to do?

Well, the prob­lem seems to be par­tial­ly solved by sub­scrip­tion ser­vices for web­site-embed­ded fonts (e.g., fonts.com http://fonts.com). But that’s lim­it­ed to web­site font embed­ding. It’s not a com­pre­hen­sive solu­tion.

The answer seems to be fonts pro­vid­ed under free licens­ing agree­ments. It’s not that free fonts are such a good deal. I cer­tain­ly don’t mind pay­ing for fonts, and I respect the tal­ent that goes into top qual­i­ty font mak­ing. But many free licens­ing agree­ments are wor­ry-free. You can use the fonts for any­thing once you have them. You don’t have to con­sult your attor­ney every time you want to put one of your fonts to use.

It’s true that free licens­ing agree­ments can be just as arcane as com­mer­cial licens­ing agree­ments. But there are a lim­it­ed num­ber of stan­dard agree­ments that you can learn and keep in mind (e.g., SIL open font license – http://www.sil.org/). What you are look­ing for are stan­dard agree­ments that allow all uses of a font.

With­out doing a sur­vey of every­thing avail­able under free licens­ing, three sources stand out. One is Google Fonts (http://www.google.com/fonts). Anoth­er is Font Squir­rel (http://www.fontsquirrel.com/). The third is Dafont (http://www.dafont.com/). All are nice col­lec­tions. At these web loca­tions, you can find a wide selec­tion avail­able. They are not only wor­ry-free and admin­is­tra­tion-free but price free too. Seems too good to be true.

In fact, some of these fonts are not very high qual­i­ty. But many are excel­lent. With care­ful choos­ing, these sources are good places to pick up a set of basic fonts for infor­ma­tion pub­lish­ing and even some dis­play fonts with remark­able per­son­al­i­ties. These web­sites are not the only free licens­ing sources, although they’re great places to start your search.

What the font indus­try needs is a stan­dard under­stand­able com­mer­cial font licens­ing scheme that every­one can come to know. In fact, there are such licens­ing schemes for free licens­ing. One would hope that the indus­try can come up with some­thing for paid licens­ing that would ben­e­fit not only pub­lish­ers but also font mak­ers who want estab­lish an expan­sive mar­ket for their fonts.

In my par­tic­u­lar case, I have a rea­son­able bud­get for buy­ing fonts for my start­up pub­lish­ing busi­ness. I have no time for deci­pher­ing licens­ing agree­ments and keep­ing track of a myr­i­ad of legal pro­vi­sions. Con­se­quent­ly, I have assem­bled the basic fonts I need from Google Fonts. I’ve spent some time sep­a­rat­ing the wheat from the chaff, some­thing I would have pre­ferred not to do. Yet I‘ve not had to spend a dime, some­thing I was will­ing to do.

I’m just one very small pub­lish­ing busi­ness. There are tens of thou­sands of us, how­ev­er, and only hun­dreds of larg­er pub­lish­ers. One would think there’s a font mar­ket for sad­ly neglect­ed folks like me.

What I sus­pect is that there’s an ample amount of pirat­ing going on by those who can’t slow down to play the font mak­ers legal games but who oth­er­wise would buy fonts. This is not good for the font mak­ers, but it’s not good for pub­lish­ers either. Pub­lish­ers need high-qual­i­ty fonts and inno­va­tion in typog­ra­phy and are will­ing to pay for them, under­stand­ing that a mon­e­tary incen­tive works well. Nonethe­less, an inco­her­ent, mis­aligned, and inef­fi­cient exchange sys­tem will always give rise to black mar­kets, smug­gling, and pirat­ing. And that’s where we seem to be today with com­mer­cial fonts used in dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion prod­ucts, all because the legal­i­ties are over­whelm­ing.