Amazon has announced that 70% of the sale of a eBook product will go to the author. In comparison with the music industry this is a huge change. Instead of rights holders getting the money the person responsible for the product’s creation will get the money instead.
The technology does also mean that new authors can actually see the benefit of their work without having to hire professional publishers – Amazon is already established as a place to purchase books from and authors are able to submit their works there will likely be a check to verify that they are authorized (ie really are the author) prior to it going live. Once it has however they will be able to keep the huge chunk of the profit.
There is a number of requirements of the scheme which seems very fair: The cost must be in the range of £1.49 to £6.99. It must be at least 20% cheaper than the physical book – this will be especially easy for new content. Surprisingly they are charging delivery on ebooks, at a cost of £0.10 per Mb. Luckily, text does not tend to take a huge chunk of space so many delivery costs will be less than that is.
This scheme seems fair to the author, the question becomes when will the music industry catch up where musicians get barely a fraction of the money generated from their work ?