The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission paid publisher PublicAffairs $40,000 to expedite the publication and shipping of its final report, according to this dispatch in the New York Times. The Times further reports that the Commission gave PublicAffairs the rights to the public domain document — now a bestseller — for no advance, despite having had $250,000 on offer from Little, Brown, which backed away when it looked “unable to meet the panel’s tight production schedule.”

According to the Times:

Commission members worked around the clock to complete the text by about Christmas, keeping it under wraps. PublicAffairs received the finished manuscript around Jan. 7, pushing it into production so that it could begin arriving in bookstores only 20 days later, a quick turnaround by any publishing standard.

That the Commission would end up shelling out fees to PublicAffairs is ironic: According to this Wall Street Journal piece from November 2010, the Commission “aggressively pursued financial compensation — for the government’s coffers. It hired agents to shop the report, and planned to pay royalties into the Treasury.”

The question remains, however, why the Commission would delay releasing its findings until they could be disseminated in print. Why not simply post their findings online and have those who wish to read the report in print to, well, wait? The commission has now posted the full report online, but this comes 20 days after the document was seemingly ready for public consumption.