It raises interesting questions about the definition of monopoly. Especially as Google gradually fades the distinction between ads and results and starts to take over categories like travel.

(not proposing anything, just making an observation)

OTOH, a customer certainly has a relationship with the car manufacturer, through advertising and mental image.

When you shop for a car you choose the make and model first, then find a dealership that will sell it to you. If you get your media from Amazon, you go to Amazon to see what they have and choose from that. Amazon controls the relationship in a way the dealer does not.

IIRC, this is basically why car dealerships exist and you can't just order a car out of a catalog.

There are many car dealerships. There are only a few car manufacturers. So the latter have forced the former into a bad deal.

Tesla, however, was in the unique position of having enough capital to open their own dealerships, which has caused a lot of friction with more traditional, "family-owned" dealerships.

Of course, historically an 90% commission on a print book would cover expenses like editing, printing, and marketing which Amazon doesn't provide; and the risk/cost of unsold copies, which ebooks don't have. Still, if you think your publisher wasn't putting much effort into the marketing anyway....

I've gone both the indie route and the traditional publisher route and I'm honestly not sure the publisher is worth the other tradeoffs. TBH, the biggest value of the publisher was that it still carries a certain (not entirely warranted) gravitas.

(I'd argue that if you're doing a book by yourself without a co-author, you pretty much have to hire at least a copy editor but that's pretty inexpensive.)

I don't doubt that even a few hundred dollars may exceed revenue for a lot of self-published works. But I'd argue that someone needs to do a careful read-through of a book. You simply don't see mistakes after a while and most friends just aren't going to do a careful enough read through for free even if they're otherwise qualified.

You paid low-to-below market rate to an ex-intern early stage career and I compared to a 20+ year proofreader in academic for ESL. Probably fishes to bicycles. I think you got what you needed which was a light touch confidence spellchecker.

A new to writing solo author, bursting with ten years of bildungsroman, who got Scriviner and has dumped two thousand disjoint paragraphs of prose into word...

I bought and read a few self-published books on Amazon. The lesson I learned was that you should never, under any circumstances whatever, pay for a self-published book. The average quality of writing is atrocious.

Publishers may not do much direct improvement of your writing, but even if they perform a purely censorious function of printing good writing and refusing to print bad writing, they're adding a lot of value.

(And my understanding is that they do in fact work with you to improve your writing, but I have no experience in the field.)

30% is the norm from Amazon anyway, though I agree the terms are onerous and a world in which Amazon (or any other large corp.) dominates distribution would not be a pleasant one for authors. The nice thing above the that though is that the Internet means that monopoly on digital distribution can be broken relatively quickly by a superior solution.

You have a source on that? Everything I see and read shows amazon takes the "standard" 30% platform rate that Apple started years ago, I think 30% is way to high as well but I see nothing in any of Amazons documentation where they take 70% of revenue for selling an ebook

On the "70% royalty option" (=30% commission), the retail price of the ebook must not exceed $9.99

If you write a college textbook that normally retails at $80, that $9.99 will be a joke to you.

This way they keep prices down (at the author's cost), or when there is real profit opportunity on the table, take the lion's share.

The prices of TextBook has long been insane largely because they are "required" by the professors that write them or getting kickbacks from publishers

No Free Market will support $80 textbooks

I am sure we are not going to even come close to agreeing on this topic so....

as to 35% royalty, how do that compare to a standard publishing contract from a publisher? I have a feeling that is still more than what the Traditional Publishers give their Authors

Compare that to someone whose life's work is some academic area where their book has become the standard textbook. If it weren't for that person's work, there wouldn't be a product here. That person can choose between a handful of publishers, and whichever publisher they go with has a product, and the others don't have one. -- The recent backlash against Elsevier and the drive towards open journals is basically showing how different the economics are here.

But the fact is: There is a spectrum here, and the above are the two ends of the spectrum.

Amazon's model is basically encouraging the cookbook-stuff and being extremely hostile towards the latter kind of content.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19273955

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996052

As you can see they are much loved with the HN crowd ;-D

Some of the highest ranked top-level comments start like

"Man, I hate Elsevier with a passion. As well as being shady, dishonest, shifty, moneygrubbing toerags, they also [...]"

"Elsevier is really, really bad. At this point, I think they are already seeing the end and investors are trying to [...]"

"Elsevier employees should just quit and work somewhere else. It's just [...]"

I'd be 110% in favor of mandating open source textbooks, where available, for any course taken by a student receiving government educational grants.

Essentially, you get to have (a) high textbook costs, or (b) monopolies over categories (e.g. one single mathematics textbook publisher).

Legacy / static topics (intro linear algebra) and evolving topics (intro biology) also have very different economic models.

When I was into sailing, I bought meteorology textbooks, because I reckon "What the heck, I pay $100 for a weekend on the water. For an extra $60 I might as well be able to read the skies and the synoptic charts for added pleasure." I recently bought the standard textbook on equine hoofcare, because a visit by the farrier costs $200 a pop, happens every 6 weeks, and I reckon "What the heck. For an extra $100, I want to be able to tell the difference between a good farrier and a bad farrier."

I think college textbooks provide extremely good value for money. Working though one attentively, including doing exercises and checking the answers etc is pretty much as good value as actually doing the course at university (if it's a theoretical subject; obviously you can't learn surgery that way). This is also reflected in the way that they are now routinely being up-sold from mere books into online courses. The market for online courses hasn't quite equilibriated yet. But it's not uncommon for authors of textbooks to recycle the book into a slideset, play the slides on video at the same time as reading the book into the audio track. Throw in a meaningless certificate, and, bang, your $100 textbook is now a $1000 online course. People pay it because, often times, it's actually still worth it. (Although I prefer the bang-per-buck ratio of textbooks to online courses).

Examples? What you’re describing does not jibe with my experience doing MOOCs. Even the better ones cover a lot less ground than a textbook on the same topic, for the same reason a lecture course does.

For my Newtonian Physics class, the textbook we were using was on its 14th edition and cost more than $100 new. I was fortunate that my professor asked us to use the 13th at the latest, and gave the mappings to the 12th edition problems (because the only difference between 12th and 13th was which order the problems were in). This for a subject that's been essentially the same for centuries.

Meanwhile my Computer Science classes all had $40 textbooks that were in at most the 2nd edition.

Inclusive of: (1) altering problem sets or numbering, (2) reordering chapters, (3) organizing chapters.

Where if any of the above are done, a free mapping must be available on the internet.

I presume there are actual university guidelines prohibiting using older editions (i.e. ones the official college bookstore couldn't buy in bulk), but most professors just didn't seem to care (in between everything else they were juggling).