I don’t know enough about book publishing and distribution to evaluate this properly, but it doesn’t seem right. Freakonomics reports that according to the US Authors’ Guild, authors will be worse off while publishers will be better off comparing ebooks to hard covers.

When I say “doesn’t seem right” I’m referring mostly to the fairness of it, but I’m also wondering how it can possibly be true.

Of course the analysis if by the Authors’ Guild, so they are naturally likely to be biased towards authors. Specifically, I don’t care how many examples they quote – I’d like to see the real data or at least a random sample of data.

They don’t talk about sales volumes, but although higher volumes might still make authors better off than the pure margin analysis shows, I expect it will have an even better impact for the publishers.

The comparison of ebooks against hardcovers is an interesting choice. I would imagine there are far more paperback books sold each year – a more thorough analysis would consider that as well.

I read another recent story about John Locke making a fortune by leveraging the low cost of ebooks and the price elasticity of books. By dropping the price of his books to 99c he is making more money than when he was selling them for ten times that.  I don’t see how that isn’t a boon to authors from ebooks.

Ultimately, it probably isn’t ebooks that are bad for authors as much as it is the pricing model of current ebooks (in this case basically Amazon but also Apple with their iBook Store).

As I said at the start – I don’t know enough about this. If anyone can shed some light, please comment away!