No, almost nothing of the $200 actually goes to the author. A typical share goes like this: (concrete numbers for Germany) 50% of the sticker price goes to the book seller, 7% to tax, the remainder to printing, typesetting, logistics, the publishing house etc.
A typical author would get somewhere between 4-7% of the net sales. Most books, especially advanced science books, on the market (not your College 101, not NYT bestsellers) sell only in the order of hundreds, maybe a few thousand copies. The vast majority of books doesn't even earn the advance back. The reason why they are often not good, is that it takes months to write 500 pages of well-thought out, well-delivered material, and the incentive to do that for $5000 is relatively low.
1,000 students per semester times $10 bucks is money I wouldn’t mind having.
Professors write tons of pages on various topics as part of their job. We call that “research”. Not sure why contributing to a book effort should be looked at any differently than research papers.
Plus, from an economic sense, when you lower the price of a compliment, your demand g or price ) goes up. So it’s actually in a university’s interest to provide books for free (or very low cost).
The few thousand copies is over the _entire_ lifetime of a book, not meant per year. Again, your College 101 book in Physics or Calculus will be used in large courses and thus sell a large volume, if it is being that used that is. There are also many competitors in the market, and yours might not see significant pickup.
So, let's suppose that you indeed sell 1,000 copies at $150 a piece. Your share is 6% of the net sales, so $8370. From this you need to pay services such as the person making the index, or pay royalty for pictures (yes, many publishing houses deduct this from the author's earnings).
Let's say your book has 700 pages, which is pretty normal volume size, and after you paid for additional services and expenses you are left with $7000. You are a good writer, so planning the book, writing it, creating examples, copy-editing and rewriting it, making reference solutions, etc. and you only spend on average 4h per page. You have made $2.50 / hour before tax. And you probably have a PhD in that topic.
> So depending on the rejection rate, which I think is ~95% in the case of Nature, you're paying for those other 19 papers to be checked.
Yes, the other 95% need to be checked, but reviewers are recruited from academics and typically do this task for free. The contribution that the publisher does at the stage of manuscript evaluation is marginal.
It'll go through the editors first, in the case of Nature these are paid positions. There's a paid "Associate Editor" position at PLOS too, responsible for "Assessing new submissions and guiding manuscripts through the review process" and more.
A submitted paper does not simply turn up in reviewers inboxes, there are steps in between.
I think people pick a few elements of the whole process and then say everything else is negligible. If paid, the academic editors and reviewers may well end up costing a huge amount compared to the spend elsewhere, but that's not the same thing as saying those other costs are small. The proportion here is largely irrelevant.
The associate editor position on glassdoor is about £40k/year, which is £45k including tax costs. Let's say that's £47k including pension contributions as it works out neatly. In the UK there are 47 working weeks, roughly so that's £1k employment cost per week purely on that one employee. That's £25/hour. At an 80% rejection rate that's actually £125/hour, at 90% it's £250/hour and 95% that's £500/hour on accepted papers (not quite, but useful for the comparison). For only a single employee, and only their direct salary.
Of course now we need to add things like the HR costs, hiring costs, building rent, computer equipment, management, etc. Double? How much time of their day actually goes to the core task and not other meetings/etc. All these things multiply up and I'm really not that surprised that the costs go up to these amounts.
I have absolutely no doubt that if the other editors were paid and the reviewers were paid then this would go up dramatically, but that's a different issue.
What exactly do the editors do? I have published more than a dozen papers across different publications like ACM and Springer. I edit the article, I am the one who provides in the format as the conferences/journals - the journals just "print". The reviewers don't charge - I know, I have been a reviewer for Elsevier too. What exactly do the editors do?
On rapiscan models (backscatter scans) it is basically software controlled, although the modularization makes it non trivial to be changed in a hack, as reported in this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_f4HUrn-NA
With "special services" insufficiently defined, this opens up a lot of possibilities. Just today, Deutsche Telekom announced that
"According to our [Deutsche Telekom] ideas, they [startups] pay for it as part of a revenue sharing of a few percent. That would be a fair contribution for the use of infrastructure."
With "video conferencing, online gaming, telemedicine automated traffic control and self-steering cars up to integrated production processes in the industry" as examples of users needing to pay, this goes a lot further than what has always been argued for by the commission.
