| This seems like a really poorly thought out article. You should take more care on making sure your understanding is correct before publishing in the future. Taking the Amazon example in Part 2: For e-books (simpler), Amazon gets 30% for running the store, doing advertising, etc. and then authors get 70% [1]. For print books, I'm a little less clear but it appears Amazon buys the books for roughly 50% of list[2] which for Hachette in 2025 is $26.50 so Amazon pays $13.25 to the publisher and then Amazon retails the book for $14.84. So for $100 of books sold on Amazon, $89 goes to the publisher and $11 goes to Amazon. It appears that the cost to produce these books is maybe $2/book (though I'm very unsure on this, this is a guesstimate from public data) and then the rest flows back to authors, advances, etc. Amazon.com (not AWS) has a 7% profit margin in North America (FY25), so of that $11 they get in revenue they get $0.77 in operating profit. Ok and this also annoyed me: you say $1.7T/y is $10.5k/worker, which is accurate. but then you say for the average household it's $26k/y. This is not true. There are 134m households in the US [3] so it's $12.6k/y for the average household. Maybe you meant something else like the median household but it seems more likely you just said ~2.6 people/household and multiplied the number of people/household by cost/worker. This is obviously wrong and you should have caught errors like that earlier. [1]: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G200644210
[2]: https://www.readersfirst.org/publisher-price-watch
[3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TTLHH |