Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Audiblegate

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 362 posts

Re: Audiblegate

#71

Post by ALittleLight »

duped wrote: post #37
ALittleLight wrote: post #27

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were bei…

Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test? Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness. No one should have shipped the service without knowing if the calculations were correct!

One problem with high turnover is that the people who have developed an understanding for how the systems should work, and which documents are definitive, are long gone and if you're lucky you know the people who knew them.

A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing here is that the people who were using the tool were using it incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers available to specific customers in certain conditions) did not understand the nuances of the different price values on offers and how they connected with royalties.

I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into our tool and they just populate two of the three different "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool still would've failed because the people using it didn't really understand the system either.

Re: Audiblegate

#72

Post by mleonhard »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #34

I find Audible really easy and convenient, but it's frustrating to hear that authors get shafted. Some independent authors I follow have been banned from Amazon's platforms and they were forced to create their own platforms and self-host. The downside is that the audiobooks are more expensive. The upside is that they're DRM-free and the creators receive a much higher percentage of sales, so they can get by with fewer…

https://www.Downpour.com is a good alternative to Audible. Downpour lets you download MP3 files of most books! The app works well on iOS.

Re: Audiblegate

#73

Post by WoahNoun »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #56
WoahNoun wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then Amazon charges the fees that it costs to get it from the warehouse to the customer within 0-2 days. If the seller thinks they have a cheaper way to get it from the Los Angeles port to rural West Virginia they are free to not use the service.

Why are you defending Amazon's fees here so much? The costs they charge relate more to their monopoly on where people shop than their actual costs involved It's just scary to think how much product quality suffers when these companies charge so much in fees. It's a race to the bottom to make any profit at all and they don't have much left to actually consider quality

>The costs they charge relate more to their monopoly on where people shop than their actual costs involved.

[Citation needed]

Offering <2-day shipping across every address in the US is very expensive. Amazon sellers can sell on Amazon without using FBA.

Re: Audiblegate

#74

Post by [deleted] »

ALittleLight wrote: post #27

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were bei…

[deleted]

Re: Audiblegate

#75

Post by chime »

Audible calculates Net Sales in A La Carte and Membership mode [1]. Is the membership mode closer to Pro-Rata mode like Spotify [2] or the User-Centric mode. Is the claim that Net Sales are shady with respect to either or both? Because pro-rata is hard to calculate and predict. Either way, this is a very complicated matter that affects the livelihoods of thousands of authors and producers but the lack of specific details makes it hard to understand what's really going on.

Audible has had to change policies based on author complaints [3] and rightly so. But the claim of "Net Sales" being correct or incorrect is hard to prove without Audible releasing the detailed data like the authors are asking for. Frankly this seems like a matter best decided by lawyers in arbitration instead of Twitter-threads but maybe online pressure is the best way the authors can get Audible to come to the table.

Either way, good luck to them. There are so many laws around sales, returns, commissions, royalties etc. that have evolved over the last century or two to protect all parties. But it's a wild west in the subscription world where Apple/Google control app markets, Netflix/Disney control TV/movie subs, Spotify/Apple/Amazon control music streams, YouTube/Tiktok/FB/Twitch control video streams. Each platform has their own rules, payment sharing, metric calculation etc. And while users can switch if the product sucks and platform owners can ban users or producers based on ToS violations, the producers barely have any power or say because there's almost no profitable alternative left.

If this was 1960s, users and producers would definitely fight for some basic standards and guarantees across all platforms (e.g. right to pause/cancel easily, allowing usage from multiple locations, right to review/audit records etc.) But in 2020s with trillion dollar market cap companies running the show, I'm not sure that users or producers get a say in how they are treated anymore. Best we can hope for is a new entrant that is better for a few years.

1. https://www.acx.com/help/HJSJJK8XP7HYURS

2. https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/11/how-spotify-royaltie...

3. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/26/audible-adjust...

Re: Audiblegate

#76

Post by ALittleLight »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #54
ALittleLight wrote: post #27

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were bei…

Since you're so willing to share your experience, was your initial product overall saving Amazon royalties or causing them to pay out more in royalties?

We were overpaying royalties. Contrary to the ideas in this thread, I think most of the people working at Amazon really do believe in earning customer trust and customer obsession. I never experienced anything even remotely like someone saying "We could earn a bit more by cheating!" And if I had, I would have felt complete confidence in raising a red flag to literally anyone above me in the org chart (though, of course, I would've gone in order). Conversely, I did experience many, many genuine people expressing earnest opinions about what they thought was best for the customer.

I would not be surprised to learn that there are harsh or exploitative terms for audiobook publishers. In that sense I think Amazon would consider that serving the customer means securing better prices. I would not be surprised to learn that some element of the people responsible for getting this working correctly were not doing so in some way (either because they didn't understand, bugs in the system, or they were too busy doing other stuff). I would be really surprised if they were intentionally cheating Audible publishers out of relatively small sums of money though.

Re: Audiblegate

#77

Post by wildzzz »

chrispeel wrote: post #14

I used to use Audible, then I got a few public library cards (they're easy to get), and now use Libby on mobile and desktop

I do like using Libby for books that don't have a long hold list and those that are very short. I absolutely hate wasting an Audible token on a 2 or 3hr book, I'll drop a token on something like a 51hr Tom Clancy book or just books I'm too impatient to wait weeks for.

Re: Audiblegate

#78

Post by tjbiddle »

ALittleLight wrote: post #27

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were bei…

"Never assume malice for that which can be better explained by incompetence"

Re: Audiblegate

#79

Post by rsanek »

lotophage wrote: post #36
ALittleLight wrote: post #27

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were bei…

The nature of these kinds of errors is that when the error favors Amazon (or whatever company), it's "keep the lights on" mode. If it's the company losing money then alarm bells ring, and it's "all hands on deck" to fix the issue.

Honestly, even that hasn't been my experience. I've seen multiple situations where there are known, significant under-billings but resourcing a project to clean that up somehow never materializes. Intuitively it doesn't make sense.

Re: Audiblegate

#80

Post by weird-eye-issue »

WoahNoun wrote: post #73
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you defending Amazon's fees here so much? The costs they charge relate more to their monopoly on where people shop than their actual costs involved It's just scary to think how much product quality suffers when these companies charge so much in fees. It's a race to the bottom to make any profit at all and they don't have much left to actually consider quality

>The costs they charge relate more to their monopoly on where people shop than their actual costs involved. [Citation needed] Offering <2-day shipping across every address in the US is very expensive. Amazon sellers can sell on Amazon without using FBA.

The fees are broken out into line items. Shipping and inventory costs is a relatively small part. General marketplace fees are much higher. Have you ever sold on Amazon or done any research on this?
Post reply on HN