Your percentages are WAY off. Bookstores get 40% off, distributors such as Ingram or Baker and Taylor get 60%. So distributors have to run all aspects of bill

Your percentages are WAY off. Bookstores get 40% off, distributors such as Ingram or Baker and Taylor get 60%. So distributors have to run all aspects of billing and order fulfillment and shipment in return for 20% . Anything over that you have to buy non-returnable or do via special sales (book clubs for instance get more of a discount but buy non-returnable and minimum order size 5000 or 10K books at a time) usually direct from the publisher. 10% of the cover price does NOT go to the author, unless he is a bigshot (famous/celebrity) or has a surefire franchise (Stephen King level). Usually, assuming the publisher is fair, the author gets a percentage of the NET amount the publisher gets. Royalties are easy to calculate these days thanks to software for publishers that keeps track of that. Example: $19.95 retail, publisher gets $12.00, author at 10% gets $1.20 (not $2.00 ). Sometimes foreign language rights are handled differently, sometimes they are the same. Amazon is making the argument that ebook pricing is highly elastic - that if ebooks on LISP programming were 1/10th the price, I would buy 10 times as many of them. Yet books and ebooks have to compete for time and attention against TV, Internet surfing, movies, and my need to sleep; which no doubt explains publishers' wariness.