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
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.