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ctrl+f whispernet 0 results found He's forgetting about the cost of delivering over a cell phone network.
If you actually read the article you'll see that he addresses this and that it applies to wifi purchases.
If you use the end user cost you can get a high end estimate for total cost of 3g service. $30 for 2GB of data makes $0.015/MB * 18.1 MB file makes for a total cost to user of $0.27 for delivery.
A more realistic number might be 15$ for 200 MB with the risk of overage fees = 1.35$ for 18.1MB. Amazon may pay more per MB than you do because of that lack of subscription good for life of the device thing or less, but they also have overhead to track that etc.
The cost might be a little high but if you don't like it, you have the choice to take your business elsewhere.
The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take?
Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).
So what is his complaint? That he didn't read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?
Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?
And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn't he 'get' that he could not have published this book at this level of success at all prior to Amazon?
[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...
ctrl+f whispernet 0 results found He's forgetting about the cost of delivering over a cell phone network.
This is confusing. Here is someone with a FANTASTIC first outing of a book and he's whinging about it? The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take? Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest…
Edit: also, amazon grants themselves MFN status [1] at the authors' expense. So they exploit their market size to make sure authors can't make up for the kindle being nearly 100% more expensive than competitors.
By "price-match" we mean where we sell the Digital Book in one
or more of the Available Sales Territories at a price (net of
taxes) that is below the List Price to match a third party's sales
price for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book, or
to match our sales price for any physical edition of the Digital
Book, in any one of the Available Sales Territories.
This is confusing. Here is someone with a FANTASTIC first outing of a book and he's whinging about it? The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take? Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest…
So yes, this rant is pretty pointless. This is the way every marketplace works nowadays: iTunes or Themeforest are the same. They take a big cut and reinvest the profits in marketing and advertising to grow the marketplace larger (and thus generate more profits for you in the long run).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you actually read the article you'll see that he addresses this and that it applies to wifi purchases.
But there's no difference from amazon's perspective, because once you bought the book, you can download it over 3g at any time, multiple times.
Amazon can charge whatever they want; I just think they should be transparent about what people's net pay will be. It's disingenuous to advertise that you take a 30% cut plus "delivery costs," and then mark up the "delivery costs" to over 25% of the average book price. Apple uses a similar paradigm (processing fees do not come from their 30%), but they only deduct the actual processing fees.
ctrl+f whispernet 0 results found He's forgetting about the cost of delivering over a cell phone network.
This is confusing. Here is someone with a FANTASTIC first outing of a book and he's whinging about it? The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take? Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest…