Quote:
Originally Posted by rhadin
Even if they had a constant feed, they would have no way of knowing whether Amazon sold 100 or 1,000 copies at the sale price.
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They could, by doing constant tracking. Amazon has immediate sale updates for publishers; if it were someone's job to track
every single sale, they could compare that with the price at time-of-sale and get accurate sales data. A few titles might slip through (where time of sale was too close to a price change) but it'd be close enough to figure out whether they sold the line at a loss.
But that's a *lot* of record-keeping. I doubt publishers intend to track exactly what sold at what time at what price... they want Amazon to give them aggregate data by day or month, and just tell them how many books sold at what prices.
If they're not careful in their contract arrangements, Amazon might hand them a spreadsheet showing every single sale for all a publisher's books--ISBN/Title/Author/Retail price/time of sale--and leave it to the publisher to sort out individual titles and discount amounts.