something else to worry about

Ian Randall Strock, the high poobah of the excellent SF news site SFScope, which anyone interested in the genre should bookmark or RSS, gives us all something else to be depressed about. As he points out here, the e-book age makes record-keeping and auditing a little more challenging. We don't as yet have a tracking system for e-books like Nielsen Bookscan does for printed books. And with printed books, the publisher and maybe its distributor are responsible pretty much on their own for shipping books and processing when they come back, and these things can be tracked and checked in different ways if the need arises. But for e-book sales, the publishers are almost entirely dependent on third parties, who can decide to play games in their reports to the publisher. And if the author goes to check on the publisher, that third party piece of paper is the only thing to look at. Hmmmm. Can we force the publisher to audit an e-book retailer if we think the retailer is playing games? Thanks, Ian. This will help me sleep better at night.