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What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

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Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#101

Post by the_af »

boznz wrote: post #64
the_af wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers). I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't…

But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.

I agree it's a difficult problem. For scifi, I usually look for Hugo or Nebula winners, but also word of mouth and recommendations.

Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble.

I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#102

Post by SoftTalker »

Marsymars wrote: post #90
SoftTalker wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a kobo. I use it to check out books from the library via Libby/Overdrive. I have never purchased an e-book.

I find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading. (I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books…

Hmm, I've had pretty good success with it. The current bestsellers are hard to get, but haven't really had a problem with anything else. I wonder if it depends on the library?

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#103

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Aarostotle wrote: post #87
ahf8Aithaex7Nai wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even simpler than that: Genuine rights cannot be transferred. Everything else is just an attempt to somehow determine who is allowed to make money from what. You shouldn’t take this too seriously, and certainly shouldn’t turn it into a fetish. You should treat it like traffic rules: if no one is watching and it’s obvious that no one can get hurt, then you can basically do whatever you want. It’s very important t…

Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad. You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it. Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.

Where do you get inalienable from? Whatever rights to property you enjoy are granted by the consensus of the people around you. If you piss them off enough, they'll revoke those rights.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#104

Post by Marsymars »

SoftTalker wrote: post #102
Marsymars wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading. (I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books…

Hmm, I've had pretty good success with it. The current bestsellers are hard to get, but haven't really had a problem with anything else. I wonder if it depends on the library?

Yeah, I'm sure it does - libraries buy licenses to a specific number of books that can be lent out. I've got no insight into how the licenses my library has stack up against other libraries though.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#105

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

Aarostotle wrote: post #93
Marsymars wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights - there's nothing that makes the latter instrinsically follow from the former.

Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it. In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project. Surely you agre…

> Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root

Intellectual property rights came about when The Church wanted to use them to prevent people from using printing presses to distribute the wrong kind of bible. They have nothing to do with property in the sense of something that you lose access to when it gets stolen.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#106

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

francisofascii wrote: post #50
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #4

> Well, from now on the workflow will be: > - Find the book I want on Amazon. > - Buy it. > - Find the same book on a torrent site. > - Download it. > - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable. Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem. Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the…

Assuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.

Sure, but they've claimed to "sell" you something, and now they're making your continued "ownership" of that thing contingent upon some future purchase. "Evil" is maybe a strong word, but I see no reason to continue playing by their rules after shenanigans of that sort.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#107

Post by Marsymars »

dingaling wrote: post #96
Marsymars wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most indie bookstores will happily order books for you from the publisher/distributor if they don't have them in stock.

At which point I might as well order from the publisher's website instead of having to explain to a shop owner what I want.

May work better in some countries than others; e.g. checking the book I'm currently reading that's published by Hachette, my local indie book store sells it for the same price as amazon.ca, (and I can easily order online, there's no need to "explain to a shop owner what I want") but Hachette doesn't seem to have any B2C online front that I'm able to order from.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#108

Post by joe_mamba »

the_af wrote: post #100
joe_mamba wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. [...] This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.

A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors. I have no desire to become a millionaire and I already have a job, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?

You said it's easy to disrupt, as per the quote, and I showed you it really isn't easy to disrupt, because if it was, someone else would have attempted it already.

Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#109

Post by joe_mamba »

paul7986 wrote: post #91
joe_mamba wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant Oh that's coming, don;t you worry, the legislative part just hasn't caught up with the LLM business yet since none of them are making much profit yet so there's nothing you can shake out of them yet What I mean by this is, in many EU countries, the unions of creative artist have lobbied the government to make u…

Sure and we as developers can vibe code other systems / ways to ensure we get paid for keeping AI relevant.

SW developers don't have the union bargaining power the music and arts industry has. At least not where I live.

Re: What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?

#110

Post by atmavatar »

Marsymars wrote: post #99
Aarostotle wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it. In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project. Surely you agre…

> For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company. No, it's for fundamentally different reasons. Physical property rights exist to protect people. IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that…

> (copyright, that expire)

For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire.

Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation.

Average US life expectancy is 79 years, humans develop their capacity for memory between 3-7 years, and copyright in the US lasts for 70 years after the author dies, so any creative work you'd remember from your childhood will only enter the public domain in your lifetime if the author dies within 2-6 years of creating it.

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