The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.
The new economics of the e-book make the author’s quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.
Hmm, how intriguing: we apparently have two ways to read…including reading a banned book:
It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning.
The second reading pathway – it’s known as the dorsal stream – is turned on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, perhaps because of an obscure word, or an awkward subclause, or bad handwriting.
Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate, Deheane’s research demonstrates that even fluent adults are still forced to occasionally make sense of texts. We’re suddenly conscious of the words on the page; the automatic act has lost its automaticity.
A pared-down police force, how can people be safe, a county judge was asked: “Arm yourselves.”
So, is this the unvarnished truth or merely scare tactics? What do you think? Where are we headed as a country, economically- and culturally-speaking?
“There has definitely been some healthy debate as to where some of our books will now live,†said Poleman, recounting a particularly heated debate about whether Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights belonged in the “Romantic Comedy†or “Cerebral Drama†section.