Online royalty statements: A modest proposal

Pat Holt makes a modest proposal on the “Holt Uncensored” blog:

If you were an author, wouldn’t it be great if your publisher gave you a password to your own royalty account?
This would be an online, frequently updated, always accessible, entirely confidential page on your publisher’s website that would replace the current system.

As frequently as you wish, you could check sales of your book, the rate of returns, the percentage taken out for reserves and varying royalty rates for bulk sales, special sales, premium sales, electronic sales, and so forth.

Given the amount of money many publishers spend on internal systems to share data among departments and to transmit data to wholesalers and distributors, why would the development and implementation of a system to share data with authors be an outrageous proposition? Read’s Pat’s complete post on the Holt Uncensored blog and you may find yourself asking the same question.