Regarding print-on-demand publishing, an author might very well think,
"when the publisher has my book, the customers, and their money, what
does it need me for?". I don't have a solution. I wonder if any
blockchain geniuses could figure something out. Short of that, how
about providing authors an itemized list of all purchases and a clause
in the contract triggering a penalty if the author can prove someone
made a purchase that wasn't listed?
More bluntly then, a publisher (traditional or otherwise) can defraud an author by selling more
books than it reports to the author. In addition to your generous
margin, a technical or legal means of preventing or disincentivizing
you, the publisher, from defrauding an author would make authors more
inclined to work with you.
I suppose the author could sell from their own website using a code, thereby registering the sale. They could also sell from e.g ebay/amazon etc via the same method: generating a code.
So long as sales are via the publishers website, they can absolutely defraud the author, but such is the case for the sale of any digital good.
I guess you could setup a "registration" scheme (e.g. to sub to errata) whereby readers need to supply their purchase code, which would reveal extra/double sells.
Comments
Regarding print-on-demand publishing, an author might very well think, "when the publisher has my book, the customers, and their money, what does it need me for?". I don't have a solution. I wonder if any blockchain geniuses could figure something out. Short of that, how about providing authors an itemized list of all purchases and a clause in the contract triggering a penalty if the author can prove someone made a purchase that wasn't listed?
Yes, that might have been an issue with traditional publishing, but here we take 9% per sale, the rest goes to the you, the author.
More bluntly then, a publisher (traditional or otherwise) can defraud an author by selling more books than it reports to the author. In addition to your generous margin, a technical or legal means of preventing or disincentivizing you, the publisher, from defrauding an author would make authors more inclined to work with you.
I suppose the author could sell from their own website using a code, thereby registering the sale. They could also sell from e.g ebay/amazon etc via the same method: generating a code.
So long as sales are via the publishers website, they can absolutely defraud the author, but such is the case for the sale of any digital good.
I guess you could setup a "registration" scheme (e.g. to sub to errata) whereby readers need to supply their purchase code, which would reveal extra/double sells.