Once enough people have eReaders I think even unestablished authors will be going this route. An author making a 10% royaly of a $25 book makes $2.50, but at a 70% royaly of a $10 ebook he makes $7. This means an author only needs to sell 26.3% of his books as eBooks to make the same as he is selling through traditional paper based books. If I can see the writing on the wall I imagine many authors can as well.

Lousy publisher websites are a symptom of the fact most publishers are simply not adapting to the digital world.

If they can’t do it in house, hire a web designer. All it takes is a little commitment.

And from the sound of it, it would be this lack of commitment to progress which has set the stage for Odyssey’s launch.

Regardless, when it comes to bread-and-butter backlist, yes, it is easy to pay the higher royalties because the incremental costs (after creating the digital version) are negligible.

The cost of creating a digital version should also be negligible. Even with associated layout costs, this is not rocket science.

After set-up digital distribution costs virtually nil. Is there any earthly reason why author royalties should be anything less than the 80% range?

Good luck turning that into a coherent business model. (And I say this as an author whose last book title turned up via a Google Alert as being available for download on a BitTorrent site before I had even finished writing it.)

No, the process of unbundling of services has started & the genie is well & truly out of the bottle. Check out David Byrne’s landmark article on the state of music contracts and business in Wired http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/16-01/ff_yorke?currentPage=all

Basically, there’s going to be a range of contract for authors, just the way there is for bands. On one end of the spectrum is the classic “Just sign here and write, you gorgeous artist you! Don’t worry your pretty head about all that messy business numbers stuff.” On the other is the full-on digital entrepreneur who handles distribution, marketing, customer service, quality control, accounting, etc., all on their own.

In between will be the contracts that most of us will sign, where we give up some of the rights to our work to publishers in return for actual services performed by them that help our sales. The unsettling thing for publishers must be the thought of authors exerting control over the way the biz/marketing side of their works goes (and having met many of my persnickety, OCD-verging-on-paranoid authorial brethren, I can’t say I completely blame them).

So if you really want to know what the years ahead hold for Big Publishing … look to the empty hallways and cobwebbed offices at Warner Music & Capitol Records. Is this good or bad for authors? Well, good for some, bad for others.

Better for consumers, though.