[LMB] Thor Power Tools, yet again

[D Echelbarger]

Ed Burkhead wrote:
> But my bookstore owner just thought the tax law had changed.  He didn't say
> that the publishers were *taxed* on their inventory.
> 
> Could it be that they just don't get the tax deduction from depreciating
> them to nothing until they DO dispose of them?
> 
> Or, could they get a tax hit in some way by depreciating them, then selling
> them for full price?

Put bluntly, until the Thor Powertools provision, publishers 
were double-dipping.

They'd take a tax write-off on "unsold inventory", keep the 
unsold inventory around, and then *sell* the books they'd 
already taken a deduction for *not* selling.

The Supreme Court ruled that they couldn't get the tax 
write-off unless they'd actually disposed of the inventory 
they were writing off.

So now they dump the books on the remaindered book market so 
they can take a tax deduction.

> The downside is that, whether it's from being too dumb to understand tax law
> or from a real change, publishers seem to have changed their warehousing
> behavior for backlist book.

Yes, but it's not because of an Evil Government Plot. It's 
because they're too greedy to be willing to hold those books 
in inventory when they can get a quick tax break by dumping 
them.

Diane E