Tangential. The claim about the $0.15 / MB delivery fee on Kindle ebooks makes AWS egress charges look cheap.
the what? :D
do they have some amazing team that comes up with these?
Audiblegate
181–190 of 362 posts
Re: Audiblegate
#182It'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.
Your housemate doesn't re-listen the recorded book, doesn't make edits, doesn't clear up passages, cut and rearrange unwanted silences? He is either wildly underestimating it by only taking the "talk into a microphone" part in consideration, or I feel terribly sorry for anyone listening to his audiobooks.
Re: Audiblegate
#183Many 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.
Could anyone clarify if that 75% includes the cost of narrating the audiobook?
Re: Audiblegate
#184I 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…
You are describing incompetence born from undirected malice. While it is true the malice did not lead directly to the greedy behaviour, it leads to an absolute lack of continuous knowledge (due to employees constantly leaving the company). The fact that this is not addressed in a way that actually works makes it at least indirectly purposeful. In that sense, Amazon as an entity is in fact being greedy and it is also not an accident.
Re: Audiblegate
#185Earlier 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).
You're right, but I think the hard part is still to find people to bridge the gap between the system experts and domain experts. An extreme example would be if you're trying to introduce a logistics management system in a shop that was exclusively using pen and paper. You'll need someone with a foot in both world to even get to the point where they can look at your models and/or documentation and say "yes, it matches…
Usually this is solved by including domain experts on the development teams. Their responsibility is not to program, but to document and verify that the test cases are adequate. This is well known, but often ignored because it's expensive.
Re: Audiblegate
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
ACX producer here. You get as much say in the contract as you do the average EULA. If you want to use Audible without a publisher to negotiate on your behalf, you get a 40% royalty rate, but not always (hence the complicated math comments). Some purchases are worth nothing (literally invoiced at a 0% royalty rate) to the authors/producers.
Why are they 0%?
Because it is good for Amazon
Re: Audiblegate
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The moat is massive.
Their existing market power means that by not being on audible you’re walking away from most of your potential readers. That bit doesnt seem too bad…
But then - they offer you a very low percentage if you sell your book anywhere else… and a not so terrible % if you go with them (not great, but not terrible).
For an individual seller it is worth taking that deal. So they do. But the consequence is that no other market can achieve comparable power.
Hence it’s an abuse of market power. Individual publishers choices won’t stop it- only government intervention. And further it would need to have international cooperation.
Which also explains why they’re lazy about fixing trivial temporary errors whether they are gaining or losing money — they own the market, and don’t need to worries about pennies.
Re: Audiblegate
#188I 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…
Too bad these kind of „mistakes“ never happen in favor of the customer… always in favor of Amazon.
Re: Audiblegate
#189The giant nosed character shown in the twitter preview for the audiblegate.com site brings to mind some uncomfortable and hopefully unintentional stereotypes.
It has large ears too. Which stereotype are you referring to that has large ears and noses? Brits perhaps?
When stereotypes make people uncomfortable, it's almost always a class of people viewed as commonly persecuted and usually a heavily US-influenced culture pointing it out. As the poster does not mention skin colour, we can assume it is white (given the US-centric context). As such, it has to be a Jewish stereotype. I am basing this on the fact that the discrimination that makes US citizens uncomfortable is generally against jews or black people. There is a certain segment that thinks discrimination against white people is an issue, but there are no dogwhistles to indicate that (and I'd assume skin colour would be emphasised more).
Re: Audiblegate
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
OP clarified the opposite here. As former amazon retail I can confirm we commonly lost money to vendors, sellers, and customers. Funny example was prime day promo fat fingered, with several expensive lenses shipped for $99.
Fat fingered is one thing. The best price error I’ve seen was something else: In 2020 the German government lowered VAT in a reaction to covid from 19% to 16%. On the first day Amazon had reduced thousands of products by exactly 19% and only increased by 16% after a few hours. AFAIK they did honor every sale during that time. I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind?…
> Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3% discount at checkout
I get your point, but they probably gave a discount of 1-(1.16/1.19) =~ 2.5%