51–60 of 102 posts
In the past Amazon has given me two grants for free AWS usage ($1000 and $300) so I personally consider them to be generous, for a corporation. I would bet that no one with real authority at Amazon reviewed this case because if they had, I think they would have made a small good-will payment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. I would say it's more like some people walked out of the library with them. The author most certainly did lose something: sales.
>I would say it's more like some people walked out of the library with them. No. If anything, they are walking out of the library with a perfect copy of the book, while the library still has the original. Nobody looses anything. People need to stop clinging to paid distribution of content as a business model. It's obsolete.
If there's no money to be made in producing content, then nobody will produce content (aside from financially independent amateurs, in the model of the 18th century novelists). There needs to be some way to monetize the labor and time that goes into the production of art and entertainment.
IMO, anyone who claims that paid distribution needs to go away also bears the burden of proposing an alternative that makes rational business sense. Ads? Donations? Netflix-esque subscription models? Pick one or pick something else entirely, but the answer isn't "business as usual, except nobody earns a return on investment."
Am I the only one who read this and though, well that's sad for the author, but isn't Amazon asking for too much in general? I mean, we're talking about e-books. I imagine I could probably make an online bookstore that sells ebooks and gives the author 75% of the selling price. Amazon is taking $5.99 and offering him 35 or 70 cents. I fail to see how it could remain in business with the relative ease with which you c…
I'm familiar with Lulu.com, and their standard ebook split gives 80% after the first $0.99 to the author. They even have a special going on right now giving 90%. (http://www.lulu.com/publish/ebooks/?cid=nav_ebks)
Granted you could argue that getting distribution on Amazon and all the Kindle owners is worth the difference. That's what makes it difficult to build a competitor. You could easily make an auction site, but the network effect of eBay is what sets it apart, not the features or pricing.
I understand that some people view disabling that feature as less of an anti-customer move than I do, but to hate it enough to waive half your royalties?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If this is true, then content piracy should also be legal. (Amazon effectively did the same thing as a pirate posting the file to a torrent tracker: they satisfied some of their potential customers with a free copy, invalidating them as real customers.) Conversely, if piracy should be illegal, then this is false, and Amazon is in trouble.
Content piracy is unauthorized distribution. Amazon here was authorized to distribute the material; they are in trouble if and only if the authorization was somehow revoked when the price reached zero. My point that there was no real loss is tangential to the actual case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your point only hold up if the _only_ reason for compensation in the case of physical books would be the cost to the publisher to print them. I'm trying to understand your point as far as intellectual property. Is it your belief that IP should not be compensated for and the only cost of the work should be whatever is necessary to the goods into consumers hands, be it physical or digital distribution? I'm not trying t…
No, my point was simply that analogies between real and digital world are flawed and shouldn't be used.
Amazon should own up and pay. They have effectively stolen from this author. No, we can't guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author. The agreement wasn't that they get to change the price any time they like. The agreement was that they get to match competitors. They violated that.
And you should go fuck yourself, you self-entitled bastard. You have effectively stolen from everyone with your belief in the ownership of expression. You and your buddy, PG, can go fuck yourselves.
The book appears to have been on sale for about 2 weeks, during which time 6 copies were sold through Amazon. So that is about 3 sales per week (from Amazon). One would expect that this publicity will do a lot more for profits than the 'lost sales' would have.
I think Amazon should be made to pay something, although maybe not the full $13k, simply to make damn sure that they sort out their systems and this doesn't happen again. If Amazon gets off lightly they probably won't change anything, and this could happen to some other unsuspecting author.
Not to mention the now-clear potential for malicious activity that this process illustrates: If one wanted to cause trouble for an author, apparently they could just post three chapters of a book to the Nook store at $0 and watch the target author's Kindle revenue drop to zero.
Amazon's incentive is clearly to err on the side of price drops -- particularly if they suffer no serious legal/PR damage from false-positives.