After he aways publishers have their margins slide marketing and license fees for most of its authors

The world of publishing has had his panties in a twist this week with Amazon 's announcement that its New York has embossed print and digital rights for the popular self-help author Timothy Ferriss \ bought' s next book. Could take over a potential print-seller, the highlight a crucial point in publishing: while a few self-published authors have done Kindle from Amazon 's ebook platform, this is new. Will writers start, it's not with agents and editors, but with the companies that sell their work directly to the public?

It 's Amazon not only cut that publishers could out of the equation; JK Rowling' s new Potter More website has been the only way out for the ebook version of the boy wizard 's adventures and the Ed Victor Agency has an eBook open and print-on-demand house - Bedford Square Books - to offer out-of-print titles written by their customers, even though they haven 't exclude publication of new books that they haven' t be able to a traditional publishing site. If all that sounds a long way from the glory days of the 18th Century published, you 'll be glad of Unbound, which is used primarily for publishing the kind of subscription for Milton's Paradise Lost to get reborn in the digital age as "crowd-funding \."

All that begs the question: what exactly is the role of the "traditional publishing". Aside from the readers and authors, the publication of intermediaries, mediators with retail on one side and the arbiters of taste and merit on the other. Publishers, but don 't just select title, the commission, to sharpen and polish them most mercilessly. Add that marketing and advertising, and you may feel that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with this model, that is to introduce you to the less-than-Gentleman, cutthroat world of the 21st Century retail and recognize that is where the confusion creeps in.

Publishing, as a whole, hasn 't really keep up. Giving into the demands for ever higher discounts from supermarkets to high street chains and Amazon, to move a stock and push up the price per unit, they have in the process voluntarily chiselling away at the license fees of the respective authors.