Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
As I understand it, the restriction is not that they must make a profit, just that they must (on aggregate) sell at or above wholesale price.
That can be proved by Amazon telling the publishers what price it has sold each copy at. It doesn't require any knowledge of Amazon's costs.
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Correct.
Plus, it is a publisher by publisher reporting effort.
It is a trivial effort for Amazon to report the *total* value of each publisher's ebooks and the number of copies sold. They already do the same for pbooks, after all.
As long as the value of the total sales equals or exceeds the wholesale cost of the number of copies sold they'd be within the bounds set by the feds.
All it takes is a simple Excel spreadsheet.
(Or a simple SQL query.)
No magic required, just 60's vintage database tech.