Umm, this posting was written in 1993. Actually a totally different publishing world than today's. As some comments point out, it's pretty questionable to claim that allowing tax writedowns that favor overproduction of a product is actually favorable to the industry. But, none of this stuff applies at all to ebooks or to print-on-demand publishing, either. So even with print books, if they're print on demand (aka digital short-run), the whole question of inventory write-down is irrelevant because there isn't any inventory. But the main thing is, even if this stuff was important in publishing circa 1993, which is open to question, hopefully if you're in publishing today you're not stuck in a 1993 business model, because if you are, you have more problems than could fit in this particular tax loophole.