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Audiblegate

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Re: Audiblegate

#241

Post by ldng »

HWR_14 wrote: post #238
banku_brougham wrote: post #83

Earlier 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.

Amazon has a worked hard to develop a reputation of being pro-consumer. And yes they will eat consumer facing errors. I have not heard the same reputation made about vendors, and in fact I've heard quite a few horror story rumors about how they treat vendors. And these complaints (vague as they are) seem to focus on Amazon passing the cost of their customer obsession to their vendors. But yes, I expect if Amazon acci…

Well, in some countries they're legally bound to anyway.

Re: Audiblegate

#242

Post by alphabetting »

sdoering wrote: post #94
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 couldn't agree more. Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weapponize public opinion for personal gain. I know from other, let's call the traditional, authors that classical book royalties were more in the 10 - 20 percent range for printed books. The upper range if you were a long published best seller with bargaining power. So I was already irritated when he stated that…

> Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weaponize public opinion for personal gain.

What is the potential gain of going after audible as an author?

Re: Audiblegate

#243

Post by prepend »

worldmerge wrote: post #232

What was the audio book market like back in the cassette days? My gramma used to listen to books on tape all the time mostly through the library.

I used to buy 2-3 per year at $30-50 each. There wasn’t a big selection and typically only best sellers would on the shelves at Waldenbooks or Cracker Barrel.

Amazon helped quite a bit as prices dropped by 30% and I bought 4-5 per year until audible. I was an audible subscriber for 10 years until my library got Libby. Not as good but free and I can read more now.

The market seems 100x as big both due to cost and ease of use. Switching cassettes and CDs was a pain.

Re: Audiblegate

#244

Post by thereddaikon »

Not a judgement on the content of the post, but is anyone else annoyed at the lazy trend to dub any controversy "something"-gate? Watergate was called that because that's the name of the hotel. Gate is not some synonym for scandal. It's just a gate. We used to have more appropriate names for things. At least the Panama Papers had a proper name, even if everyone forgot about it and nothing ever came of it.

Re: Audiblegate

#245

Post by Aeolun »

morelisp wrote: post #164
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).

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.

> that's too much to expect from development teams

Wut? The development team is capable of dealing with that just fine. It’s the business unit throwing requirements over the fence and hoping it’ll magically be OK that’s the problem.

Re: Audiblegate

#246

Post by HWR_14 »

ldng wrote: post #241
HWR_14 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has a worked hard to develop a reputation of being pro-consumer. And yes they will eat consumer facing errors. I have not heard the same reputation made about vendors, and in fact I've heard quite a few horror story rumors about how they treat vendors. And these complaints (vague as they are) seem to focus on Amazon passing the cost of their customer obsession to their vendors. But yes, I expect if Amazon acci…

Well, in some countries they're legally bound to anyway.

Oh, I expect them to obey laws. And I certainly don't automatically believe that they are screwing over vendors in the same way I'll automatically believe claims of them going out of their way for customers. I was mostly pointing out that how they treat customers is not necessarily related to how they treat vendors.

Re: Audiblegate

#247

Post by germanier »

lozenge wrote: post #236
aloer wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked this up just now and apparently Amazons case is more complicated due to things like sold by Amazon (16%) vs third party sellers (they got to choose if they pass it down to the customer or not). It was an economy stimulus after all. And apparently fixed book prices (printed on the back) were up to every single publisher to decide about Then you also have different VAT rules depending on the product category.…

Amazon sold all e books from Luxembourg to UK customers, charging them 3% VAT. When calculating royalties for publishers though, their contracts stipulated the 20% VAT rate would be used to reduce royalties. According to The Guardian, some received just 10% of the purchase price, similar to what Audible(also Amazon owned) is being accused of. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/oct/21/amazon-fo... Uber also s…

Since 2015, VAT on eBooks is charged according to the buyer's country, see e.g. https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/electronically-supplie... This is also reflected on my invoices from Amazon.

VAT law is harmonized across the EU, which country's rate is applicable is based on a rather complex (and ever changing) set of rules, but nowadays it's mostly the buyer's country.

Re: Audiblegate

#248

Post by MrDunham »

mrleinad wrote: post #233
reddog wrote: post #227

He lost me at the start by complaining about Audibles listener friendly return policy. How is the producer "shouldering the cost" when I return their crappy, overwritten, poorly narrated audible book for credit?

Not sure what the limits are for returning content, but I'd set some if they haven't already. You shouldn't be able to return the content if you listened on its entirety, for example.

There's a bit of a fine line here. I used a credit on an audible book that was just rehashed, mediocre content and empty promises. The gulf between the marketing promise and content was very, very wide.

That was one I read in its entirety thinking that something insightful or useful would come of it and by the end it was clear that the author just read a handful of blog posts on marketing and slapped together a book to call himself an author.

I returned it for a credit.

Now, I should mention that I have over 120 audible books in my library and I’ve only returned two since joining audible 7 or 8 years ago.

But should I have gotten a refund for that book?

On one hand it was a never ending stream of empty promises that were all left unfulfilled. On the other hand, I read the book in its entirety.

Perhaps audible does/should have a mechanism to keep an eye out for abuse. I’d call myself a pretty darn good customer that has read plenty of mediocre books that weren't returned. Someone constantly downloading and refunding books to game the system, OTOH, should probably lose the refund privilege.

Re: Audiblegate

#249

Post by lolinder »

matsemann wrote: post #106
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…

> Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take. You think it is fair that Amazon sets an arbitrary low price, and then makes the authors take the cost. That's an odder take. If Amazon wants to sell their tokens at price X, have a campai…

And why shouldn't Audible set the price? No one signed up as a creator on Audible thinking they'd get let out of the credits system. That system is Audible's business model. It's how they sell so many books.

I've bought many audiobooks for one credit that I never would have bought at list price. Most creators' net revenue from me would be zero if I had to pay the full list price.

Re: Audiblegate

#250

Post by MrDunham »

thrower123 wrote: post #29

I've always thought it was a bit odd how it is usually cheaper to buy a Kindle copy of a book and add the Audible narration on, than to buy the Audible audiobook outright.

I'm convinced that the prices of audible books for people without a membership were solely to drive people to memberships (Much like how Vail ski resorts has admitted they increased ticket prices by over 200% so that they can say a season pass will be paid for with only four days of skiing)
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