Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
That's because you're looking at it from the POV of the customer, not the author. It makes a great deal of sense from the author's perspective. The majority of books don't pay more than their initial up-front royalty payment. By selling country-specific or regional rights to multiple publishers, the author receives multiple royalty payments, and hence makes more money. The business model is designed (absolutely rightly) to give the maximum benefit to the author, not to you, the customer.
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I think you confuse royalty (i.e. payment for what was sold) with the advance. I think that authors get advances from the initial publisher of the work, not from subsequent geographical publishers. Obviously I could be wrong, but from what I read, that's normally the way it works. The royalty payments (i.e. how much the author gets per sale) probably does vary based on publisher.
My second point is that the geographical restriction model came about because in older times, publishers were smaller and not world wide. Plus it really didn't make a lot of sense to ship a lot of books from London to the US, or from the US to Australia. It was much more cost effective to actually print the books in the country where it was being published. While I suspect that in modern times, it's true that sometimes an author can get a better deal especially on a book that did well initially, for most authors, foreign publishing rights doesn't really move the needle since they might sale less than a thousand. Thus it's simply a business model that has continued by inertia rather than anything else.