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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

#151

Post by polygamous_bat »

preventionist wrote: post #127
wffurr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t running your own infrastructure. It’s the extortionate rent for the big tech infrastructure and the anticompetitive DRM lock in. If there was a competitive ecosystem of client software and hardware and also online stores and it all interoperated, we would have a lot more choice, control of our purchased media and devices, and lower prices too.

What prevents the existence of such an ecosystem? What are the main obstructions? The most obvious ones I can think of are the data centers and necessary protocols but those are easily solvable problems with enough cash. The other obstruction I can think of is that consumers don't actually want these stores and protocols because they're perfectly happy with the services that big tech delivers. Convenience seems to be…

> What prevents the existence of such an ecosystem? What are the main obstructions?

You're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is anti-trust is dead, and the tech companies running the show are too damn big. If you start a competitor to audible, it can use its leverage with both AWS and Amazon and squeeze you until you're dead, and then continue on with its monopoly.

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

#152

Post by mcv »

sgregnt wrote: post #150
slowmovintarget wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Brandon Sanderson's criticism of Audible? [1] > If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.) > Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of…

Sorry, I just don't understand the complaint, if you don't like audiable, then don't do business with them? You can sell your book yourself directly.

That's exactly what Cory Doctorow is doing (no idea about Sanderson). Not just directly, but on every platform that's not Audible.

That doesn't make the complaint less relevant, though. The complaint is the explanation for why they're doing so.

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

#153

Post by rvense »

brightlancer wrote: post #136
bitwize wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mont…

> Album sales rarely made money for musicians

Before Napster they definitely did. The saying is that you used to tour to promote the album, now you make the album to promote the tour. Artists have always been last in line to get paid, but there was much, much more money in it before 2000.

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

#154

Post by mcv »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #54
inhumantsar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except he was one of the key people behind it until a couple of years ago

Presumably he left for a reason.

It is weird that a platform that he was a big part of and that supposedly supports his values, has apparently turned into they used to oppose.

But I've got to admit I stopped reading BoingBoing a couple of years ago.

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

#155

Post by helpfulmandrill »

diatribist wrote: post #26
I_am_tiberius wrote: post #13

I find it awesome that Cory writes you personally when you pay for the book.

How would he manage to do that for thousands of people?

Every time I bought something direct from his website, I got a quick thank you email. I think that's what is meant - not that he writes to you if you buy it in the bookstore.

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

#156

Post by merdaverse »

Qwertious wrote: post #123
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…

The strength of the DRM isn't really relevant;_DRM is primarily intended as 1) a legal weapon under the DMCA, and 2) an inconvenience to remove.

Relevant to what? There's a huge business in videogames to make DRM constantly stronger and more intrusive. Definitely not as easy to break as the parent comment description for Audible.

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

#157

Post by lyvxh »

patmcc wrote: post #140
freeAgent wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe we need HDCP headphones/speakers?

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

#158

Post by slowmovintarget »

mcv wrote: post #152
sgregnt wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I just don't understand the complaint, if you don't like audiable, then don't do business with them? You can sell your book yourself directly.

That's exactly what Cory Doctorow is doing (no idea about Sanderson). Not just directly, but on every platform that's not Audible. That doesn't make the complaint less relevant, though. The complaint is the explanation for why they're doing so.

Sanderson specifically went looking for platforms that don't just put the book on Audible. So Spotify and Speechify.

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

#159

Post by taeric »

fatfingerd wrote: post #147
taeric wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May not be their intent, but at large declaiming something is bad and "enshitifying" the internet is a very transitive label? And again, there is no evidence that audible is lessoning consumer choice? There is some evidence that they lesson producer practical choice. But even that is weak? With few exceptions, mostly audible produced works, I can find all of the books I care about elsewhere.

The cumulative point of this thread seems to be that they are getting to work with 75% of 90% of the audible book market (you claim books are available elsewhere = 25% commission). You can call that whatever you want, but it sounds a lot like the descent to pre-Internet situations that weren't markers of stable quality and that many people who survived the 1980s don't want to see again.

I'm not clear on this post? What do you mean?

They have 90% of the audio book market, likely. They do not have exclusives on that much, though. I'd hazard that 90% of the available book market is through the major publishers, still. At large, this makes sense, as most books are still written with upfront payments from publishers.

I would also not really shed much of a tear for Audible. I just don't understand the idea that getting rid of them moves us further from the old style. Seems more likely that the publishers would brow beat any future entry into the market so that it was much closer to how things were in the 80s and 90s.

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

#160

Post by taeric »

eslaught wrote: post #146
taeric wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that it will depend on the book? I'd love to see more discussion on that whole ecosystem, honestly. Some of the first searches seem decent to read on. I just know that, even today, the audio books I purchase are far cheaper if I get them from Audible than basically anywhere else. Unless it is a book on CD I get from the library, for obviously different reasons. I also know that things are byzantin…

My understanding is that Amazon runs imprints, like Audible Originals [1], that basically act like a publisher. I.e., they buy the rights, produce the audio, pay the voice actor, and the author gets some royalty (presumably smaller than 40%). But my understanding is that the large publishers mostly do this themselves (and therefore have to pay the voice actor out of the 40% cut they get). Similarly, independent autho…

I'd only rephrase your later paragraph to say that the reason it is cheaper is because Audible chased their marginal cost advantage of copies and drove for cheaper sales. Publishers have known of subscription models forever, such that they could have done this years ago. They didn't, because they chased the marginal costs of printing books so that that was their advantage.

That is, the new advances in audio recording and digital distribution led to a vastly superior marginal cost environment that didn't exist back in the 80s/90s. Publishers decided not to lean in on that, and by the time Audible had demonstrated that it was a viable market, it was too late for them to squeeze them on license costs.

I admit this sounds almost conspiratorial, but they literally colluded to try and force higher prices on ebooks. Such that I don't find this that beyond the pale.

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