Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

Post by ImprovedSilence » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 12:09 AM UTC

earl wrote: post #16

ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

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…

At a guess: the author feels ripped off in the same way I feel ripped off when I buy an airline ticket and have to pay $25 to check a bag, $12 for a sandwich, etc. If amazon's fee is $4.50 they should say so instead of burying a cost almost equal to their quoted fee in fine print. Edit: also, amazon grants themselves MFN status [1] at the authors' expense. So they exploit their market size to make sure authors can't…

Post by res0nat0r » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 12:11 AM UTC

mycroftiv wrote: post #29

ChuckMcM wrote: post #14

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…

He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because "it says so in the contract" is ridiculous. You aren't actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon's Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post…

Post by ashconnor » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 12:12 AM UTC

sjtgraham wrote: post #13

This is naive as it fails to consider that Amazon has probably made a considerable loss on the Kindle hardware business to create this market the OP is lucky enough to participate in. This investment alongside the investment in their own AWS infrastructure is why there is a reasonably sized market for ebooks right now. Also how about the cost of cellular data? The cost might be a little high but if you don't like it,…

Post by ImprovedSilence » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 12:14 AM UTC

res0nat0r wrote: post #33

mycroftiv wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because "it says so in the contract" is ridiculous. You aren't actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon's Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post…

> charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS! Do you think that the largest file sharing service (S3) and the largest public cloud computing infrastructure (EC2) in the world just operate for free? Digital delivery fees help pay for the millions in hardware, software, infrastructure and maintenance costs for these services, which Kindle uses extensively.

Post by notatoad » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 12:17 AM UTC

cs702 wrote: post #3

I strongly suspect Amazon is offering well-known, "must have" authors a much better deal -- possibly even losing money on sales of some of their books -- and making it up by giving a raw deal to less-well-known, independents like Andrew Hyde, the author of this blog post. Does anyone here know if this is indeed the case?