Amazon announced a new royalty option for authors of some Kindle books yesterday.  From the news release:

"Today, authors often receive royalties in the range of 7 to 15 percent of the list price that publishers set for their physical books, or 25 percent of the net that publishers receive from retailers for their digital books," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. "We're excited that the new 70 percent royalty option for the Kindle Digital Text Platform will help us pay authors higher royalties when readers choose their books."

This represents a significant change for authors, and potentially another blow to publishers.  But it also makes us remember something noted tech guru/author Clay Shirky said in a speech at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo in NY.  The speech was titled "It's Not Information Overload.  It's Filter Failure."  It wasn't directly about pricing.  But in the first few minutes of the speech, Shirky discussed how the invention of the printing press created "information abundance," because the cost of producing manuscripts dropped precipitously.  Then with the advent of the Internet (550 years later), the cost of publishing changed drastically again.  Anyone could publish.  And the key change was that the risk attached to publishing all but disappeared.  (Think about the Amazon announcement in this context: with digital platforms the "publisher" does not have to guess how many books to publish--so the risk of projection goes away.  Thus the author gets more of the revenue).  The rest of the speech may be less relevant, but still worth a look: