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Audiblegate

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Re: Audiblegate

#131

Post by aloer »

banku_brougham wrote: post #83
lotophage wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The nature of these kinds of errors is that when the error favors Amazon (or whatever company), it's "keep the lights on" mode. If it's the company losing money then alarm bells ring, and it's "all hands on deck" to fix the issue.

OP clarified the opposite here. As former amazon retail I can confirm we commonly lost money to vendors, sellers, and customers. Funny example was prime day promo fat fingered, with several expensive lenses shipped for $99.

Fat fingered is one thing. The best price error I’ve seen was something else:

In 2020 the German government lowered VAT in a reaction to covid from 19% to 16%.

On the first day Amazon had reduced thousands of products by exactly 19% and only increased by 16% after a few hours. AFAIK they did honor every sale during that time.

I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems with short term VAT changes in mind?

Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3% discount at checkout

Re: Audiblegate

#132

Post by mdoms »

avazhi wrote: post #53

Not at all a fan of Amazon, its anti-competitive business models, or Jeff Bezos, but this Twitter thread is a bit ridiculous. Unlike other goods, Audiobooks can be distributed in literally dozens of ways, in hundreds of formats, on quite literally billions of websites, to just about anybody. How is Amazon/Audible some sort of bullying gatekeeper here? If your book is good, it'll get noticed, and word of mouth is more…

> If your book is good, it'll get noticed

This is a fantasy.

Re: Audiblegate

#133

Post by ALittleLight »

a2800276 wrote: post #121
Abodono wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's greed in this case, but in my time at Amazon I saw many teams in "Keep Lights On" mode where one or two people with vague memories of how services are supposed to work try to keep them running I worked for Amazon as well, and I'd say it is greed, not in that the behavior was purposely designed to be malicious, but in the way they don't properly fund developers to work through their tech depts, and spend…

I'm always amazed that people can't see this as greed. If the CEO of a medical equipment company said: "screw all these expensive software engineers, physicists and testers, I have a 14 year old niece who can code up our radiation therapy machine for nickels" no one would be blaming incompetence of devs. I don't see how all the lack of solid requirements, software development process, testing and means of recourse ar…

I just meant to differentiate it from people at Amazon going "Let's cheat the publishers out of their royalty!" Of course that might be what happened, but it would surprise me. If you want to think of not hiring enough people to do the work that's required as greedy - then I think it's fair to call greed as the source of the problem.

Another element of this that cuts against "greed" as the motivator in my mind is that it isn't like anyone who would implement the details here would give a hoot if Amazon went plus or minus ten million dollars (or whatever the amount is). If you are the leaf node in the org chart making the exchange of money happen then you will get paid the same regardless of what happens. There may be some big boss guy somewhere who cares about that number, but he doesn't have the ability to actually do the cheating, he'd have to order someone else to do it. Again, maybe that's what happened, but it just seems unlikely to me as it would be so easy for the people receiving those orders to go "Hmmm, no, I don't think so."

Re: Audiblegate

#134

Post by playpause »

delgaudm wrote: post #44

It's terrible for the narrator too. In many cases the narrator makes a bad decision to record the Audiobook not for a per-finished-hour rate, but as a "Royalty Share" where they only earn on the Royalty -- that's 20% (50-50 royalty split with the author) on the audiobook version. In most cases a narrator will never earn even close to minimum wage for the effort to create an audiobook. And it's more effort than you mi…

My housemate is an audiobook recording engineer. I just asked him about it. He says in the best case, with a skilled narrator, an hour of audiobook can take only 1 hour 10 minutes to record. In the worst case it can take up to three hours. I asked him if it could ever take up to five hours and he said no way, never.

Re: Audiblegate

#136

Post by trymas »

.. and twitter shafts their users, by not allowing to read the thread for people who do not have a twitter account.

> See what’s happening

> Join Twitter to get the full story with all the live commentary.

Re: Audiblegate

#137

Post by abdullahkhalids »

napsterbr wrote: post #105
delgaudm wrote: post #44

It's terrible for the narrator too. In many cases the narrator makes a bad decision to record the Audiobook not for a per-finished-hour rate, but as a "Royalty Share" where they only earn on the Royalty -- that's 20% (50-50 royalty split with the author) on the audiobook version. In most cases a narrator will never earn even close to minimum wage for the effort to create an audiobook. And it's more effort than you mi…

Out of curiosity, why does it take 5-12 hours to record one finished hour?

You just don't have to read it out loud. You to read it at an even pace, have to enunciate properly, have to decide what words to emphasize in every sentence or how you change your tone etc.

Getting this right for every paragraph will usually take multiple takes. Then there is additional audio editing and what not.

Just for reference, as a prof, just creating a 30 min video that students can watch on their own time, easily takes 2 hours of work. This is where you just remove the worst errors, to get a just-good-enough product.

Re: Audiblegate

#138

Post by rob74 »

radicalbyte wrote: post #126
makeitdouble wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it happens a lot more than people want to acknowledge. I worked on a discount calculating service with no prior knowledge.It was supposed to replicate an existing system, so we went through the oroginal specs and general litterature to get a sense of what we were supposed to make. First day of test with a employee in the field, and it appears that they have specific calculation rules that are so obvious to th…

This is a universal problem, it's so universal that there's even a field of development which solves the problem - Domain-Driven Design. It's not exactly rocket-science either - you basically involve domain experts in the development proces directly, and codify their knowledge in a form that they can understand (be that very explicit models, or focussed domain-specific languages).

Sounds good, but I can see several obstacles to this, especially when it's not an internal tool (and most of the time it isn't, unless you're Amazon): e.g. that the people talking to the customer are not the same people developing the application (maybe the people on the customer's side are not the real domain experts either); or that the customer has a mentality of "we hired these guys to develop a shiny new system for us, but our guys are much too busy to act as counselors for them" etc.

Re: Audiblegate

#139

Post by harry8 »

harry8 wrote: post #92
IIAOPSW wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon doesn't get sued for the instances that are not in their favor. Consequently, you never see those in the news. https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al...

I don't get prosecuted when I visit someone's house and don't burn it down when I ring their bell. There is no excuse for this. None.

You didn't like that example of how survivorship bias has zero place in this discussion?

Try on the picture of the bullet holes in planes when mounting a defense of reckless and culpable driving occasioning property damage while making your case to the judge that he hasn't heard about all the times the accused did not crash their car despite driving in a woefully incompetent manner...

There is ZERO excuse for this. You can't "accidentally" rob people and claim incompetence while pointing to other times you were incompetent and yet didn't rob people. It actually goes the other way. If you were incompetent, knew it and didn't fix the issue you're in deeper trouble.

Pictures of planes don't change that there is no excuse for this. None. Really.

Re: Audiblegate

#140

Post by harry8 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #60
harry8 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not theft because it was "accidental" every single time in our favor is a new one. Don't think many courts would view it favorably if you don't have the extremely high priced lawyers Amazon will use to deter and defend this. You can't make mistakes like this any more than you accidentally burn one of Bezos' house to the ground "accidentally" trying to get proper restitution ringing his doorbell and it all going…

Actually, in the case I experienced we were overpaying publishers. The error was going against Amazon and we decided not to ask for our money back because we thought it would hurt customer trust. (This decision not to do anything about the amount we already overpaid was made above my paygrade, but that's my understanding of it).

You gave audible rights holders additional money or was it in Amazon's favor every single time in this utter debacle? I haven't yet heard of Amazon saying "we actually overpaid some audible rights holders" If you have evidence of it definitely add it to the discussion. Looks to me like that's not what has gone on.
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