So, what no one is talking about is the little line that Amazon slipped into their announcement package: " For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs."

They went on to say: "Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold."

NO BIG DEAL, right? 

Well, maybe not right now, but the e-book arena is expected to explode with all kinds of new features embedded in books - links, pictures, video, animation, and who knows what else - and what does that mean?  BANDWIDTH. Cost to download.

That is what Amazon is really doing - positioning today for the huge files that will be downloaded in the future - and the ability to charge the publisher/author for the "delivery" of those files.

We may all be yearning for the days of 25-30% "royalty."