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Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

andrewhy.de

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Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#101

Post by nandemo »

tylerneylon wrote: post #44

Some commenters say the post is wrong to complain when the author is making money through amazon's distribution, or when amazon takes a loss on selling kindles. I disagree with both sentiments. Main point: It does not cost amazon an average of $2.58 to deliver the author's pdf. Amazon is being dishonest by calling this a delivery cost. I consider it unethical to name a fee something that it is not. "Be grateful for w…

It's called "delivery fee", not "delivery cost". It makes no sense to require a business to charge fees solely based on variable costs.

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#102

Post by waterlesscloud »

dandelany wrote: post #80
res0nat0r wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting a static file in S3 you have to point people to manually find and download themselves is much cheaper because you don't have the built in captive audience, WhisperNet and everything else which comes with the Kindle ecosystem, so comparing the two only via a flat dollar cost is naive.

It's ridiculous to include the cost of the entire "Kindle ecosystem" with a fee called "delivery fee" - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it's just 3G service that they leased from AT&T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachmen…

What they're doing is charging one fee based on price and an additional fee based on file size. This separates the incentives for the publisher, which makes sense.

It's also worth noting that his book is large compared to your average novel. He clocks in around 17.6 megabytes, whereas even a giant novel like Game Of Thrones is only 3.3 megabytes. Hunger Games is a paltry 0.5 megabytes.

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#103

Post by sitkack »

reedlaw wrote: post #87
dandelany wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ridiculous to include the cost of the entire "Kindle ecosystem" with a fee called "delivery fee" - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it's just 3G service that they leased from AT&T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachmen…

Probably Amazon is charging more to offset the cost of their unlimited free 3G usage. Before I had a 3G phone, I purchased a 3G Kindle partially to take advantage of this incredible offer. With a 3G Kindle in the US I could freely browse the web anywhere with no limit.

On an e-ink kindle.

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#105

Post by Karunamon »

balloot wrote: post #91
Karunamon wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is indeed $3 to transmit a file. They even call it a "delivery fee". Consider that the percentage cut they take should cover all of the above. I can get a physical pizza delivered for less than Amazon charges to send me an electronic file. That's just messed up. Hell, I can get physical goods delivered, from Amazon, with 2 day shipping, for less than they charge to send an electronic file! And how much do you…

If it bothers you so much, you are free to not use Amazon. It's not like they have a monopoly in the eReader market. What exactly am I missing here?

>you are free to not use Amazon

Much like I am also free to call bullshit when I see it.

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#106

Post by masklinn »

coderdude wrote: post #20
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…

"What is the marketplace doing to earn this percentage of my sales?" seems to be a common question asked by sellers. The last thing on their minds it would seem is the fact that the marketplace is selling their item for them and providing the infrastructure so that they don't have to handle all that PITA interaction. This is especially true of Amazon. You get a lot of value by selling on their marketplace. The high n…

That's what the 30% markup is for...

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#108

Post by duaneb »

mycroftiv wrote: post #48
res0nat0r wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Did you read the blog post? The author specifically was comparing the cost of delivery via the Kindle service to using Amazon S3/EC2 to deliver the content. His specific comparison was that the price that he would pay to host and deliver the content using Amazon's own services, would be orders of magnitude smaller! In other words, the comparison you are making is the exact basis for his entirely justified claim that…

You pay Amazon to put it on the Kindle store, not for the storage.

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#109

Post by stickfigure »

Consumer here. What I don't like about this absurd per-megabyte price is that it discourages authors from including quality pictures in their books.

This finally explains why the Kindle version of some books I've bought were garbage. In particular, I was enormously disappointed with Lonely Planet books - the maps are poor quality and split out among several pages so it's almost impossible to find anything. It was a terrible mistake not to buy the PDF.

Between the awful maps in Lonely Planet and the absurd number of OCR glitches in Modern Times, I've spent my last Kindle dollar.

Re: Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%

#110

Post by emmett »

derleth wrote: post #89
res0nat0r wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it's very clear to me that they're just taking a huge margin here. Exactly. They are trying to run a for-profit business. The T&C for data charges is clearly laid out in a simple table I found within 30 seconds of Googling. I'm not sure where the expectation of charity comes from that they shouldn't be making a profit,…

> They are trying to run a for-profit business. So... are we morally barred from complaining, or is it merely to be considered gauche? (This reminds me of the people whose entire conception of "Free Speech" is "I can say anything and if you criticize that's an infringement of my rights.")

Complaining that a business is charging too much money for its product is silly, if everyone is willing to pay that price. The central insight here is that there is no morally correct price for something, there is only the market price. Goods and services don't have "correct" prices, there is only what people will pay.

If you are willing to pay, saying they are charging too much is just wishful thinking.

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