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Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

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Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#131

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

taeric wrote: post #56
thfuran wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers? Yes. Shitty practices from a market player with significant monopoly power are bad for all of them.

So you can show that authors are getting less money in this environment? And, despite me being able to trivially show that I paid less per book than any offered alternative on the table, with the exception of the library, you claim I'm getting a raw deal now? We can even add in performers and others doing the recording to this question. Obviously, I only have the numbers on what I paid out. If you actually have the o…

Yes. This is the modern anti-trust loophole. Same thing Google does with "our products are free so we can't be a monopoly".

If every party wins then the only drawback is that the market evaporates and you end up with monoculture. Not a big deal unless the single player turns "bad" and starts abusing their position. Even if customers flee it would take a decade to regrow the free market.

And there's a huge buffer allowance for just being "a little bad". Like, "oops, sorry about that author/candidate that we crushed on accident, we've made a tweak to the algorithm and it won't happen again" but the damage is done.

I think a lot of people know that today it's a win-win but are just afraid what these companies _might_ do.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#132

Post by chromoblob »

OO000oo wrote: post #106

Pure silliness. The problems at hand are political economic matters. Individualist virtue signaling like refusing distribution with DRM is a good way to build a brand but will have no role whatsoever in actually accomplishing said goals.

This is just author's decision to distribute his audiobook without DRM. I don't see that this decision must necessarily be tied to the actual goals. Maybe author has other goals too and doesn't want to act in conflict with them.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#133

Post by chromoblob »

causality0 wrote: post #96

because Amazon will not carry it This is a lie. Further, it is a lie designed to outrage the reader and drive engagement. It is enshittification. "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Saying Amazon won't carry your book is like saying the App Store won't carry your app...because you refuse to participate in a walled-garden software ecosystem.

What's wrong with blaming App Store for refusing my app for me refusing to participate in a walled garden?

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#134

Post by brightlancer »

"The Internet Con describes how this came to pass, but, more importantly, it tells us how to fix it. It lays out how we can combine different kinds of interop requirements (like the EU's Digital Markets Act and Massachusetts's Right to Repair law) with protections for reverse-engineering and other guerrilla tactics to create a system that is strong without being brittle, hard to cheat on and easy to enforce.

"What's more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality."

Cory ignores that we only need Right to Repair laws because GOVERNMENTS made it a crime in the first place! So color me skeptical that governments are going to "fix" the mess they created.

Most of the other problems are simply that most people value things differently than he does: most people are happy with sandboxes from Apple, Facebook, Google, etc., and are not interested in free software, interoperability, etc.

We can't improve that with government intervention and we shouldn't try -- look at how they helped with DRM.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#135

Post by chromoblob »

Jiro wrote: post #51
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and I'll roll my eyes very hard every time I read the word "enshittification" Why? It seems like a good description that accurately describes the behavior and is reasonably obvious on first reading.

It's a horrible name. It obviously implies that something is being made shitty, but it fails to say what or how. "Enshittification" could just as easily mean "the process by which your computer fan gets clogged with dust" or "the process by which rice loses vitamins when you cook it too much". It's like calling it "bad stuff" except with more profanity.

Those two definitions could work only in a special context and wouldn't be adopted as a widely known word. Cory's definition, though, can work so, because it is a coined term for an important sociological phenomenon.

About including the essence of meaning into the word, I would propose 'entrapment'. But "enshittification" seems to be a special choice for conveying derogation and evoking attention to the discussion - so called dysphemistic and emphatic swearing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity#Types), and this goal might be more important for the author than that of making the word's meaning obvious from word itself. If 'enshittification' catches on, it will be able to be considered as worthy of attention anyway, and one won't need to use word's lexical clarity to judge its importance.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#136

Post by brightlancer »

bitwize wrote: post #76
taeric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember it has almost always been publishers pushing drm. And yes, I remember serial port keys that tried to lock cad software. Some were keyed to physical sectors on hard drives.

Creators as well. Talk to anyone who works in a creative field that isn't programming. They want DRM. They love it. And the reason why is simple: DRM works. It does the job. It doesn't stop all piracy, but it greatly attenuates it allowing the creators to make a buck. I remember discussing this with a writing group in the 90s, when the first e-readers came out. They vastly preferred the DRM-encumbered platforms becau…

> Take DRM away, and creators will just stop releasing things digitally.

Is that guaranteed?

Album sales rarely made money for musicians; they made their money from live performances and merchandise. Plenty of musicians have released their music online as MP3s to drive folks to their concerts.

And long before DRM, we used to record things off the radio.

It's easier than ever to share music but instead people pay monthly subscription fees to streaming services.

Folks will pay for convenience. A lot of "piracy" was driven by an inability to get something _at all_ or only at an absurd price. And despite the protestations of the music and movie industries (both with long records of screwing over the artists), it's unlikely that "piracy" cause much financial loss.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#137

Post by aaron695 »

freeAgent wrote: post #115
xavdid wrote: post #107

A slight quibble: > They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon's monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library. While it's true that your purchases are tied to your Amazon account, they are not tied to your audible subscription (if you have one). That's a nice touch. Even better, the DRM is trivially easy to remove. Audi…

I can only assume that Audible’s weak DRM will be replaced as soon as they deem the audiobook market sufficiently captured.

[dead]

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#138

Post by cbozeman »

bitwize wrote: post #76
taeric wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember it has almost always been publishers pushing drm. And yes, I remember serial port keys that tried to lock cad software. Some were keyed to physical sectors on hard drives.

Creators as well. Talk to anyone who works in a creative field that isn't programming. They want DRM. They love it. And the reason why is simple: DRM works. It does the job. It doesn't stop all piracy, but it greatly attenuates it allowing the creators to make a buck. I remember discussing this with a writing group in the 90s, when the first e-readers came out. They vastly preferred the DRM-encumbered platforms becau…

Yeah...

That's why Good Old Games and CD Projekt RED is doing so incredibly well... because of it's robust DRM that's nearly impossible to break.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#139

Post by vanchor3 »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #74
wlesieutre wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem isn't just with the royalty rates, it's making the default rate so low and using it as leverage to push authors into exclusivity contracts. Imagine if Apple started telling companies "You have to pay us a 60% cut, unless you agree to not have an Android app in which case we'll do 30% instead." You could argue that Apple is entitled to make that arrangement because they essentially created the mobile app so…

Bias disclaimer: AWS is my current employer The meaningful difference between these two examples is that Apple is a gatekeeper to the iOS market. Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does. Nobody can publish an app to the iOS App Store without going through Apple (and Apple doesn't allow alternative app stores or sideloading for consumers).

> Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does.

Sure, but audiobook publishers won't be there because of their exclusivity requirement with Audible, and they won't drop the exclusivity requirement because Audible has all the market share, and so the website never grows to compete.

Once Amazon figured this out with the Kindle and started pushing exclusivity there, books very quickly started disappearing from other online stores.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#140

Post by patmcc »

freeAgent wrote: post #115
xavdid wrote: post #107

A slight quibble: > They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon's monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library. While it's true that your purchases are tied to your Amazon account, they are not tied to your audible subscription (if you have one). That's a nice touch. Even better, the DRM is trivially easy to remove. Audi…

I can only assume that Audible’s weak DRM will be replaced as soon as they deem the audiobook market sufficiently captured.

Really strong DRM on audio files is pretty silly because it's so easy to workaround, if you've got an audio signal going to speakers you can capture/record it no problem.
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