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In that article, Molly Barton, Penguin’s global digital director said that e-book production “costs 10% less” than print book production. “But,” she added, “the largest expense is author payment and always has been.”
Let me say, simply, bullshit.
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Either Ms. Rusch is right about author's advances beiing the largest expense of publishers or she is wrong. Virtually everyone in the business press accepts this as being true. Ken Auletta, a Pulitzer Prize Winning journalist, reports it as fact
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Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books. The industry produces more than a hundred thousand books a year, seventy per cent of which will not earn back the money that their authors have been advanced; aside from returns, royalty advances are by far publishers’ biggest expense. Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...#ixzz1smUjIz6G
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Ms. Rusch is entitled to her own opinion, but not to her own FACTS. I'm not likely to credit her opinion, if she is wrong on an important fact.