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Audiblegate

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Re: Audiblegate

#171

Post by pas »

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…

Um. Amazon is a marketplace, it gets a cut. Since the sale is void, the seller gets 0, Amazon gets some percent of that, which is ... 0.

what the hell. how else could it be? if Amazon is billing sellers for "transaction" costs (or presence on platform cost), that's one thing, but that should be a fixed dollar amount.

even using the term "cost" makes no sense, because it's not a cost, it's "would have been revenue", and yes, there's a cost of doing business, handling returns, etc. but all of those are automated on this shiny marketplace, right, right? right!?

Re: Audiblegate

#172

Post by MaysonL »

Many on HN would say that Apple's 30% cut on App Store sales is perhaps unfair.

Is Amazon's 75% or 60% unfair, or is it highway robbery? Not to mention what they actually pay instead of the contractual amount.

Re: Audiblegate

#173

Post by bawolff »

bitcharmer wrote: post #144
koide wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't mean to never investigate, but to never start with the assumption that it is malice. You can complement it with the famous "trust, but verify" quote. Or with "giving the benefit of the doubt".

Nope, the quote is quite limited in terms of conveying the idea. It never says anything about verification or trust. It basically says: "never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence took place". That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age.

> never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence took place".

Reading the quote literally i disagree. There is miles of difference between "adequately explained" and "possible"

> That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age.

I would actually argue the other way is naive. Assuming that all bad things that happen in the world are because of an evil person is what happens in movies and fairly tales. The real world is almost never that black and white.

Re: Audiblegate

#174

Post by rplnt »

It needs to be repeated that twitter is the worst medium for anything like this.

Also, don't hook people with "40% is too low", because it isn't, and you might lose them before getting to the point. Especially easy on twitter, see above.

Re: Audiblegate

#175

Post by Dave3of5 »

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!

> Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test?

Most companies now-a-days don't write spec up front. That's called Big Design up Front (BDUF) and it was seen in this industry that this was prone to failure which could cause the whole project to fail. That's because it's impossible to know everything up front and often during the project the requirements will change as the stakeholders learn of the consequences of their decisions.

In fact most companies don't do a "spec document" at all they design their system in small iterations called "sprints" typically 2-weeks and the "spec" is a ticket in a system like Jira (others are available). This process is part of Agile Project Management methods

> Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously checked for correctness

There are some industries where they still do that kind of thing (BDUF) for example government work, defence, oil and gas. These are older industries that just haven't changed the way they approach projects. Amazon here is a bit a front runner when it comes to updating it's practices to be more leading edge so they likely adopted an Agile approach here learning about what was required as they go through the project.

Re: Audiblegate

#176

Post by INTPenis »

HotHotLava wrote: post #167
falcolas wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah the funny thing is that AWS, GCP, Azure and so on provide all the infrastructure to cheaply distribute audiobooks on your own.

All we need now is for someone to sit down and write an open source tool for it.

I'm a dreamer but I see a world where audiobook creators can create an account on a privately hosted instance, sort of like bookwyrm but with payment features, promote their work using ActivityPub in a federated way, and distribute the media p2p using something like peertube.

And consumers can hear the media in any of a number of clients.

Re: Audiblegate

#177

Post by gambiting »

pas wrote: post #171
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…

Um. Amazon is a marketplace, it gets a cut. Since the sale is void, the seller gets 0, Amazon gets some percent of that, which is ... 0. what the hell. how else could it be? if Amazon is billing sellers for "transaction" costs (or presence on platform cost), that's one thing, but that should be a fixed dollar amount. even using the term "cost" makes no sense, because it's not a cost, it's "would have been revenue", a…

Yeah I genuienly think that the author expects Amazon to just eat the cost of returned books. Looking at their other arguments, I guess it's simply because "they can afford it". And while that's true, I don't see any reason why it should work this way - even actual real life bookstores return unsold books to publisher and the publisher has to eat that cost.

Re: Audiblegate

#178

Post by pas »

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…

> it can take literally years to earn $500 to $1000 in royalties

but then it goes on forever, right? (as long as copyright lasts)

(sure, the NPV probably still sucks due to time value of money)

Re: Audiblegate

#180

Post by gambiting »

contravariant wrote: post #169
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 t…

I'd love to know the stats for how many people listen to the entire book(or 90% of it) and then return it. I have refunded books on audible before, but it was always because I didn't like the narrator, I listen to books while driving and sometimes the narration works in the car, sometimes it really doesn't - that's when I refund and get something else, but it's always within the first hour of listening.
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