81–90 of 102 posts
I think the real story here is that he chose the 35% royalty rate over the 70% rate “because you can opt out of Kindle Lending.” 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?
Big business vs the little guy is extremely unfair these days. If I had given away 6000 free mp3s or movies via a P2P system you can bet they'd try me in court for the full price of them all, but in this article already they are equivocating saying "oh but they were free, less people would have paid for it so he can't realistically ask for all the money for all the copies we gave away". How come when a big company ge…
I thought HN was good at math: lim(number_of_lawyers) = 0 USD payed 1 -> infinite
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"If these were physical books", there would be a material loss involved: Publisher A paid to produce X books, the distributor lost part of them, and now the Publisher cannot sell them anymore, suffering a direct and quantifiable economic loss. Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them. There is no direct loss…
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.
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.
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>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.
> The author most certainly did lose something: sales. But they didn't lose 6000 sales, they lost however many sales they would have made at $6. So it's tricky to quantify the damages.
* Weasel wording here because it seems likely to me that the distribution contract ends up giving Amazon the right to do this sort of thing with this guy's copyrighted work.
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.
Where did you read it had only sold six copies previously?
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Authors get nothing for books lent through the library and people have been OK with that for a long time. A book still has to be purchased.
Libraries purchase physical copies of books (often at higher prices to get a sturdier binding). For popular books, libraries purchase multiple copies, some of which get lost or damaged, and must be replaced. In other words,authors still see some income from libraries. With Kindle Lending, there is no substantive gain for authors.
They gain access to readers who won't put up with being forbidden to lend someone a book.
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Authors get nothing for books lent through the library and people have been OK with that for a long time. A book still has to be purchased.
Libraries purchase physical copies of books (often at higher prices to get a sturdier binding). For popular books, libraries purchase multiple copies, some of which get lost or damaged, and must be replaced. In other words,authors still see some income from libraries. With Kindle Lending, there is no substantive gain for authors.
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.
No, it's like people read the book, went home, and wrote it down again. The original book is now back in the shop and the publisher is free to sell it. How can you "lose" a sale that you don't know you'd get? I bet 6000 downloads for an unknown writer of zombie-pulp wouldn't have happened without the £0 price tag. We can argue about it all day, but the fact is that there is no direct loss, and if there is an indirect…
Your argument hinges on the idea that he wouldn't have made a single sale and would still have expended time and effort in promotion of the work if he knew it were being given away for free.
The difficulty in quantifying the cost is largely irrelevant IMO. Either Amazon are guilty or not and if found guilty the court I'm sure has an equivalent case of similarly priced works being given away for free that they could use to model the award given to the appellant (eg mp3.com $25k per work/CD made available). Such an award should be in terms of punitive damages.