Ken Auletta dramatically “reports” a portion of that which already happened–the emergence of Apple as a seller of ebooks and the introduction of the agency model–and he and the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department join the ranks of those who misconstrue the economics of publishing. This one is a whopper, erasing all the margin in hardcover publishing by misunderstanding how returns work: “Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On […]
