Dr.Syntax
Coverage of the Hachette-vs-Amazon dispute has recycled various misconceptions about what’s happening, as Michael Cader noted Wednesday in Publishers Lunch. But one of the most widespread fallacies you may hear, and not just relating to Hachette/Amazon, is that “e-books have been more profitable for publishers than print books,” as Evan Hughes put it in Slate. The chunky margins generated by e-books, the thinking goes, are what the publisher and the 600-pound gorilla of bookselling are tussling for.
Even before this dispute, some industry voices, led by Mike Shatzkin (echoed by Hughes in the piece just cited, and of course the agent community), have argued that in a sense publishers have been asking for trouble by maintaining such high margins on e-books—like kids walking back from the candy store, their pockets bulging, past the local bully. Shatzkin proposed that publishers raise their royalty rates on e-books so that they could gain some advantage by sharing the “extra” profits with authors before the retailers could zero in on them.
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