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Comment by immad | Hacker News Reader

In my mind, the issue is more to do with other people getting rich off the back of this authors work while the author gets hardly any thing.

So the question is not the value of the book to society, but the percentage of the value the author should get versus everyone else in the stack.

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Is that true in the sense that it makes you feel bad, or true in the sense that you think a smart publisher could make more money with lower rates? If you're right about how much it costs to profitably distribute a book, you could potentially dominate the publishing industry.

well, I hope the ebooks will change this. With the costing of printing going away, you don't need a publisher anymore. The only thing you really still need to do is marketing.

Of course, the flip-side is that anyone will be able to publish a book and most people will know how to steal them. Neither of which make for great prices. Still, interesting times.

Publishers with a good reputation will likely continue to act as a combination of editor and gatekeeper. Anyone can put something out now, but saying that it has been edited, approved, and possibly marketed by a major publisher will likely to carry some weight.

In fact, there is a possibility some publishers or indpendent editors functioning as publishers will begin to take that on as a primary role and become very selective in what they attach their name to.

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