The reality is even worse than what this graph suggests. From the $1.59 royalty only $0.77 stay with the author (the rest is tax), but the $0.77 are barely any profit if you account for the cost of human labour that went into writing this book in the first place. Depending on how many copies he'll sell through Amazon I think it's likely that the time spent on writing this book could have earned him more by cleaning the floor at McDonalds, which is a really sad state of affairs.
Books on technical topics establish authority and are incredibly useful for advancing your career. They open doors and teach you how to tackle big personal projects. Your dollar for dollar analysis is probably close, but isn’t the whole picture.
If I'm calculating correctly, Amazon demands $19.30 fixed cost + $2.29 dynamic based on total price. So at $99 Amazons percentage would be a lot less than 40%.
I put some similar data into another publishers system and it calculates roughly a third of a $99 book would go to the author. (softcover; 400 pages of which 200 are in color) Tax would further reduce the profit.
If it's put on KDP and using their print on demand, it works approximately as follows:
The cost of the printing of the book is subtracted.
You then get 60% of what is left.
The only way amazon's percentage will reduce below 40% is if you print the book through another source and sell it on Amazon as a platform. Then you're going to need to manage inventory.
Source: editing, typesetting and researching self-publishing for a friend who's going through this process right now.
At this point the ethical thing to do is to pirate the book and donate the money to the author. Like, if I were him, I would just put the PDF up on the pirate bay with a link to my patreon.
Edit: I see it's also on Google Books, which I presume has a more ethical paying structure. Sadly, that's not available in my corner of the EU yet.
Are there no other publishing platforms that do this for a flat fee? Apart from taking payment and applying DRM, what else is involved? Checks to ensure the author is the legal owner of the copyright?
On each pirated book, the e-book "distributor" (i.e. google play) is doing nothing. They won't be doing any marketing, they won't have any distribution costs: it'll just be as if it were a less popular book than it actually is.
I'm sure the author could have set up such an arrangement for the e-book himself if he preferred it.
Bear in mind that actually running a payment page results in a whole world of pain surrounding stolen credit cards, refund requests, compatibility problems and technical support demands. If you enjoy the writing, you probably don't want to be doing that.
> On each pirated book, the e-book "distributor" (i.e. google play) is doing nothing. They won't be doing any marketing, they won't have any distribution costs: it'll just be as if it were a less popular book than it actually is.
The author knew that, and yet he made voluntarily decision of going into an agreement with them. Disrespecting this agreement is disrespecting this decision and, therefore, the author himself.
Wait, what? Amazon is a monopoly. They aren't charging a fair competitive price. Your "argument" only works if the author has other options for distribution. Otherwise it's not a decision.
Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on physical book production or distribution. As the author notes in TFA, he looked at other production options and they were roughly the same as Amazon.
If the author signed an exclusivity agreement with Amazon then he'd be in breach and Amazon could seek penalties. Otherwise he would not be in breach and Amazon should expect him to use other distribution channels as the fancy takes him. That's about the extent to which ethics enters into it, as far as I can see.
