I think you&#x27;re right, but I don&#x27;t think in <i>this</i> case there&#x27;s as much of an impedance-mismatch as in those other cases.<p>While I might <i>say</i> &quot;book gallery&quot;, the real description of the place might as well be &quot;curator&#x27;s service with a storefront serving as street-visible advertising.&quot; That the curator happens to <i>have copies of</i> the books they will recommend you is just an obvious extra convenience to throw in, from their perspective; the room for stock in their store is less limited than the room for recommendations in their brain. When e-books are free to pirate, basically <i>all</i> of the price you&#x27;re paying for the book at a store (or a game on Steam, or a song on iTunes) is in appreciation of the value—including the convenience—of the curation service. If both the buyer and the seller know they&#x27;re exchanging money for curation, but just both happen to call the trade &quot;selling a book&quot;, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s really a problem.<p>On the other hand, in a modern economy, if you actually <i>do</i> want to transfer value to the <i>creator</i> of a piece of IP, you have to explicitly cut out the middlemen entirely. If you really like e.g. a band and want their career to thrive, you <i>don&#x27;t</i> buy their album at a store; you buy their album online straight from them (usually this means &quot;via Bandcamp&quot;), and you go to their concerts and buy merch, and you support any adaptations that happen to their work so they&#x27;ll receive royalty payments.<p>In fact, in my own life, I don&#x27;t think I experience much &quot;bundling&quot;—I&#x27;m always either paying solely for the value of the middleman, with the creator receiving at most a pittance, or I&#x27;m paying some outsized amount as a show of appreciation to the creator of a thing. (The one exception I can think of is venue tickets. I <i>want</i> that money to go to the people on stage, but almost all of it goes to the people who built the building and the people who run the website that took my money and generated me a PDF of a barcode. Horrible racket, that.)<p>---<p>&gt; the &#x27;stars&#x27; in the movie take a large cut but any one of hundreds of actors could have done that part<p>Actors are paid based on their &quot;star power&quot;—the ability to pull an audience purely by trading on the interest people have in seeing a movie with that actor in it. Effectively, they&#x27;re getting their royalties for using their name in all the advertising copy, not for actually acting in the movie.<p>If this wasn&#x27;t true, you can bet there&#x27;d be a thriving industry of &quot;actor impersonators&quot;—typecasting taken to an extreme, where directors could just order up &quot;someone who can be <i>That Guy From That Movie</i>, for this movie&quot;, and get 100 entirely-qualified applicants. &quot;People who made themselves look and sound like Tom Hanks&quot; would outnumber the world population of Elvis-es.<p>&gt; the publisher&#x27;s executives takes a large cut of the book price but did little of value<p>This isn&#x27;t actually a problem; it&#x27;s a vestige of the old system where publishers were necessary for typesetting, printing, and distribution logistics. The old generation of authors are staid in their ways and still suffering through working with these antequated beasts, but the new generation have switched to buying the services that publishers provide <i>à la carte</i>, with Kickstarter for the &quot;business loan&quot;, a contracted freelance editor, software doing most of the typesetting, Lulu for printing, and Amazon for physical distribution. You might need a publisher to get into bookstores... but—just like we&#x27;re talking about here—who still shops at bookstores?