If Amazon had asked publishers what they thought about locking in e-book prices at $9.99, it would have been subjected to a chorus of outrage. That’s because the math behind publishing is seldom in a publishers’ favor. The sale of a $20 hardcover nets a large publisher about $10. Royalties run the publisher about $3, and the costs of printing, binding, and paper are a further $2 (more for low-volume titles). Take $1.20 for distribution, $2 for marketing, and that leaves a publisher with roughly $1.80 to cover rent, editing, and any other costs. A smaller publisher might keep closer to a dollar per book.

The New York Times (3/1/10) did a similar exercise, basing its analysis on a $26 hardcover rather than $20--out of which the publisher keeps $13 instead of $10. (The Times' reporter, Motoko Rich, sources these figures to "interviews with executives at several major houses''; she's by no means anti-publisher--see FAIR Blog, 3/2/10, 3/18/10.) The costs cited by the Times are similar--$3.90 for the author's royalty, $3.25 for printing, storage and shipping (vs. the Review's $3.20 for printing plus distribution), $1 (rather than $2) for marketing. The Times breaks out editing, design and typesetting as its own item, listing it as 80 cents. This leaves $4.05 for the publisher as profit before overhead--math that is considerably more in the publisher's favor.

When it comes to contrasting the hardcover economics with ebooks, the Review piece becomes very vague:

E-books reduce the cost of printing, binding and paper, but royalties tend to run higher, and all other costs are largely unchanged. Publishers account for these costs when they slap a price tag on a book, so Amazon's decision to set the price irrespective of them set off a wave of anxiety.

Actually, according to the Times, royalties run lower in electronic publishing--$1.75-2.50 on a $9.99 ebook. Books published electronically, of course, eliminate rather than "reduce" the costs of printing. Other costs go down, because your sales volume goes up when you reduce the price to the consumer by more than 60 percent. And the retailer--the evil Amazon--gets less of a take from each sale, so the publisher winds up--according to the Times, which, again, is quite sympathetic to the publishing industry--with about as much profit on each copy sold: $3.51 to $4.26, depending on how the author's royalty is calculated.

What actually set the big publishers off was not worry that they could not make as much money selling electronic books at Amazon's price, but worry that they would lose out on the opportunity for windfall profits that comes with a new technology (FAIR Blog, 7/23/10).  Is that evil? No, that's capitalism. Or, if you prefer, "Yes, that's capitalism." There's certainly not a lot to prefer about the publishers' business model, either from the reader's or the writer's point of view.

The Review's website blurbs the piece, "What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors?" That's what's most misleading about the article: the suggestion that corporate publishers are not profit-maximizing enterprises in the same way that Amazon is. This would surely come as news to News Corporation (i.e., HarperCollins), CBS (Simon & Schuster), Bertelsmann (Random House), Reed Elsevier (Houghton Mifflin) et al.

P.S. Daniel Ellsberg makes a stronger case for the evil of Amazon here.

In response to the excerpt's lead example of "15 heavily armed men" who attacked a Caracas synagogue, "held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple" with swastika graffiti, Pepito illustrates exactly "how ridiculously inaccurate that article is" with "a couple of points":

Not mentioned in that article was that the attack on the synagogue was perpetrated by a band of thieves led by a night guard who had worked at the place for years and who used the anti-Semitic slogans so they could throw off the police investigation. They were captured a few days later with a hundred thousand dollars they had stolen from the synagogue's vault.

After the attack on the synagogue, Chávez himself talked live on TV to Elias Farache, president of one of Venezuela's main Jewish associations, and gave him his word that he was not going to tolerate anti-Semitic attacks in his country and that he was going to protect the Jewish community. Farache himself denied the government's supposed culpability in the attack....

Also, the article does not mention that Fred Pressner, president of [the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, a group] representative of Venezuela's Jewish community, repeatedly complained to the Wiesenthal Center, asking them to consult with the Venezuelan Jewish community before accusing Chávez of anti-Semitism.

Pepito's parting shot at 3 Quarks Daily and the Boston Review: "Pointing the finger at Chávez's government for some isolated anti-Semitic events in the street while ignoring the fact that for many years (and before Chávez was elected) there have been small groups with anti-Semitic leanings (usually formed by conservative ultra-Catholics) is disingenuous, to say the least." See the FAIR Media Advisory: "Editing Chavez to Manufacture a Slur: Some Outlets Spread Spurious Charges of Anti-Semitism" (1/23/06).