Audiblegate • Hacker News Board

Re: Audiblegate

#161

Post by gwd » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:48 AM UTC

estaseuropano wrote: post #109

jsnell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site has more details in other articles. They're not worth reading. There's no substance just a lot of charged language. And I'm really annoyed at spending any time at all on reading this. The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of c…

Without having read the whole page, I understand form your summary that: A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each book, irrespective of the price sold. D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can, underpr…

> Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power. In a competitive environment no producer would accept this.

Hasn't Audible's business model been basically unchanged since its inception? Everyone who puts their books on their knows the price of a credit, which is normally like $15, and so knows they'd get at best $6 per book sold on there. How would Audible become a monopoly if people didn't like those odds?

Furthermore, I don't see much of a "moat" here. Suppose there was a company called BetterBooks, which had the same business model and price per credit, but gave 60% commission instead of 40%. If publishers were genuinely unhappy with $6/book, they could list it on BetterBooks and get $9/book instead. The quality of books on Audible would drop, and nobody would buy them.

Re: Audiblegate

#162

Post by radicalbyte » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:50 AM UTC

rob74 wrote: post #138

radicalbyte wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design. It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).

Sounds good, but I can see several obstacles to this, especially when it's not an internal tool (and most of the time it isn't, unless you're Amazon): e.g. that the people talking to the customer are not the same people developing the application (maybe the people on the customer's side are not the real domain experts either); or that the customer has a mentality of "we hired these guys to develop a shiny new system…

In the first case: natural selection sort of works for products. If you want to survive you need to find a way.

In the second case: that is a massive smell and time to find a new job. Which from the comments regards turnover at Amazon seems to be the case :-)

Re: Audiblegate

#163

Post by gwd » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:52 AM UTC

matsemann wrote: post #107

djrogers wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased at full price. I’ve got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say I’d have bought exactly none of them at full price.

And those promotions should be a cost of Amazon, not the authors. Weird how Amazon can take your product, sell it for a quarter of the price, and then claim they now owe you no money.

Audible's whole business model is to sell monthly credits on subscription for $15, which can be used to purchase any audiobook. That's not a "promotion", that's how Audible works.

Now they do also have sales where they sell books for like $5 or something; if those sales are not opt-in, of course that's a problem. But I have a hard time believing they're not opt-in.

Re: Audiblegate

#164

Post by morelisp » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:55 AM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #126

makeitdouble wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it happens a lot more than people want to acknowledge. I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make. First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to th…

This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design. It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).

Sorry, but domain-driven design is actually when you have "class Licensor; class Licensee; class RoyaltyPayment". What you're describing is competence and attention to detail, and that's too much to expect from development teams.

Re: Audiblegate

#165

Post by gwd » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:56 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #157

degeberg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run out of credits, you can also buy 3 extra for £18 (I'm not sure what the USD price is). That's significantly cheaper than buying 3 audio books at full price. Credits with frequent 2-for-1 sales, £3 sales and £1 sales, there is just no reason to ever pay retail price on Audible.

I suspect the retail price is just there as a psychological suggestion to make you think you are getting a good deal with the credits.

Back in the 90's I bought several audiobooks on tape for long car journeys; the retail prices listed on Audible seem similar to the price I actually paid back in the day. A lot of the titles are also available on iTunes as well, and the prices were comparable to the retail price listed on Audible. Audible really is a good deal.

Re: Audiblegate

#166

Post by raverbashing » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 9:57 AM UTC

playpause wrote: post #134

delgaudm wrote: post #44

It's terrible for the narrator too. In many cases the narrator makes a bad decision to record the Audiobook not for a per-finished-hour rate, but as a "Royalty Share" where they only earn on the Royalty -- that's 20% (50-50 royalty split with the author) on the audiobook version. In most cases a narrator will never earn even close to minimum wage for the effort to create an audiobook. And it's more effort than you mi…

My housemate is an audiobook recording engineer. I just asked him about it. He says in the best case, with a skilled narrator, an hour of audiobook can take only 1 hour 10 minutes to record. In the worst case it can take up to three hours. I asked him if it could ever take up to five hours and he said no way, never.

Yeah this is the difference between professionals and less experienced narrators.

I'm not buying the 5h/h thing neither. How long is an average audiobook? Booking studio time, etc for that plus the heavy editing that a 5h take would take is just not worth it.

Re: Audiblegate

#167

Post by HotHotLava » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 10:01 AM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #40

axxl wrote: post #11

The twitter thread and the accompanying website don't quite tell me what's going on besides 'not as much money as expected'. But I can't quite see what the 'Net Sales' problem is, it's just stated as "less money" for no reason? Although I am tired so maybe something just isn't clicking. I don't doubt that the terms of the deal are poor though. I had wondered for a while how the credit system worked, and if the increa…

I haven’t dug into it too deeply myself, but here’s some numbers from late last year. Note that this as a producer sharing that 40% with the writer half and half (royalty share contract). One month saw 21 sales of a $19.99 audiobook. Amazon reported net sales of $76, so I made around $11. EDIT: looking closer, 17 of the sales occurred in a market/purchase combination that resulted in no royalties at all. The invoice…

> But it’s Audible. What choice is there?

I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily discounted price and still come out ahead.

If enough producers come together this way you could even create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop and account system.

Re: Audiblegate

#168

Post by ekianjo » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 10:10 AM UTC

tjbiddle wrote: post #78

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"

only valid at the individual level.

Re: Audiblegate

#169

Post by contravariant » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 10:12 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #149

I'm honestly curious about this statement, maybe someone can explain - the author seems to be upset about this part: "where the consumer could return their AB whenever they pleased, and the PRODUCER shouldered the cost." ....as opposed to who? When you return an item to amazon within their returns policy, who do you think pays you back for that? Is the author assuming that when their book gets "returned" for any reas…

Well, taking it to absurd levels it would be something like if Spotify were to claim they are 'selling' songs to people who are currently listening to them and they are 'returned' when people stop, with Spotify just paying royalties over the difference.

The situation with audiobooks is far less extreme, but there is a cost attached to lenient return policies. Though you'd expect Amazon to be losing more money on it than the authors, so it's more like the authors disagree with Amazon's business model.

Re: Audiblegate

#170

Post by bawolff » Thu, Feb 17, 2022, 10:13 AM UTC

bitcharmer wrote: post #112

bawolff wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As they say, "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence"

I'll just copy my comment from another leaf of this thread: I don't like this saying because it generalises too much. For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful, malicious action.

You can still fire people for incompetence. Its also just as important to do root cause analysis with incompetence as malice.

In the cop example, if everyone is turning off their camera because the interface is terrible and if you don't do it just right - that problem requires a very different solution than if they were intentionally turning it off. If you assume it must be malice the fixes will be wrong and not accomplish anything. That doesn't imply that malice is impossible, just that you shouldn't assume it without investigation.