good luck with that…

because, yeah, amazon is gonna let you lower their discount, i’m quite sure of it, because they need you more than you need them, right? yeah, sure they do…

-bowerbird

1. Going to a licensing model does not necessarily require that an advance be paid on “royalties.” In fact, more and more publishers are trying to do “no advance” deals with authors so I think we’ll also see more “no advance” deals with rights. So whatever the problems with the rights paradigm in the retailer space, the requirement for an advance doesn’t have to be the thing which knocks it out.

2. The problem with your “net pricing” idea, I think, is that it doesn’t account for the fact that, in the digital download world, eventually most publishers WILL sell direct to end users even if they didn’t in the past. And they will sell at some price, which will be, de facto, the publisher’s retail price. This is already happening, of course, and Amazon has apparently raised the point with some publishers that their “discount” is meant to be off the publisher’s price, and if the publisher is selling for less on their web site, their discount should be based on the lower price.

That’s why I have advocated cutting the DISCOUNTS to intermediaries and have the publisher continue to sell at “full retail” (except for special promotional offers, bundles, etc) Seems like that would give us a cleaner playing field, if not a more level one.

This is all still in the stage of getting more complicated, not simpler.