Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

pluralistic.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 182 posts

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#161

Post by taeric »

d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #131
taeric wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can show that authors are getting less money in this environment? And, despite me being able to trivially show that I paid less per book than any offered alternative on the table, with the exception of the library, you claim I'm getting a raw deal now? We can even add in performers and others doing the recording to this question. Obviously, I only have the numbers on what I paid out. If you actually have the o…

Yes. This is the modern anti-trust loophole. Same thing Google does with "our products are free so we can't be a monopoly". If every party wins then the only drawback is that the market evaporates and you end up with monoculture. Not a big deal unless the single player turns "bad" and starts abusing their position. Even if customers flee it would take a decade to regrow the free market. And there's a huge buffer allo…

It is this odd debate on what companies "might do" that is so annoying to me. Don't paint what they are currently doing, today, as if they are already doing the future thing.

More, don't pretend like them doing something they are almost certainly legally bound to do because of the other big actors is their fault. Lobby to change rules, but realize that if you kill the newcomer to the market, you are likely setting up the old guard to take back over. And they are almost certainly going to do what they always do.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#162

Post by taeric »

vanchor3 wrote: post #139
cmeacham98 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bias disclaimer: AWS is my current employer The meaningful difference between these two examples is that Apple is a gatekeeper to the iOS market. Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does. Nobody can publish an app to the iOS App Store without going through Apple (and Apple doesn't allow alternative app stores or sideloading for consumers).

> Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does. Sure, but audiobook publishers won't be there because of their exclusivity requirement with Audible, and they won't drop the exclusivity requirement because Audible has all the market share, and so the website never grows to compete. Once Amazon figured this out with the Kindle and started pushing exclusivity there, books very quickly started disappeari…

What books aren't available outside of the Kindle ecosystem?

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#163

Post by beej71 »

ghaff wrote: post #78
omgmajk wrote: post #68

Doctorow always has interesting stuff to read, I've been looking at most of his work for years now. The physical book will now be delivered to me when the Kickstarter ends as that's my preferred way of reading. I kinda don't get audiobooks myself, I find it hard to concentrate on the book and often have to pause and go back and re-listen because I zoned out. I guess this is semi-offtopic but I like Doctorow and he ca…

Audiobooks are basically for the (mainstream, ie not hard of hearing) case of having a long driving commute or otherwise spending a lot of time in a car. Doesn’t really work well for books with a lot of detail or figures.

I'd love this use case if they didn't lull me right to sleep. :)

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#164

Post by freedomben »

warkdarrior wrote: post #149
freedomben wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain why you want to steal from the author? Has he offended you with his high level of consideration and respect?

The Kickstarter page shows that the author has already received the amount of money they asked for (and more). So they should be OK with their book being distributed for free to the rest of the world. Or do you think the author should use some form of DRM to control what people do with their book?

Why should the author have to force you to act ethically and follow the law? Do cops have to follow you around everywhere to ensure you don't steal stuff?

Also you're missing how Kickstarter works. The fundraising goal is not a ceiling, it's a floor.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#165

Post by beej71 »

warkdarrior wrote: post #149
freedomben wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain why you want to steal from the author? Has he offended you with his high level of consideration and respect?

The Kickstarter page shows that the author has already received the amount of money they asked for (and more). So they should be OK with their book being distributed for free to the rest of the world. Or do you think the author should use some form of DRM to control what people do with their book?

First, false dichotomy.

Second, I'm not sure CD is anti-copyright.

Third, you're not in a position to say what he's all right with unless he's said he's specifically all right with that.

I'm not trying to convince you to pay the author, but your rationale is lacking.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#167

Post by sundarurfriend »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #4

The kickstarter page is much more informative than this article: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-c...

(Note: This comment was about the original submission link which was to a boingboing.net article. The post link has been changed since.)

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#168

Post by wffurr »

preventionist wrote: post #127
wffurr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn’t running your own infrastructure. It’s the extortionate rent for the big tech infrastructure and the anticompetitive DRM lock in. If there was a competitive ecosystem of client software and hardware and also online stores and it all interoperated, we would have a lot more choice, control of our purchased media and devices, and lower prices too.

What prevents the existence of such an ecosystem? What are the main obstructions? The most obvious ones I can think of are the data centers and necessary protocols but those are easily solvable problems with enough cash. The other obstruction I can think of is that consumers don't actually want these stores and protocols because they're perfectly happy with the services that big tech delivers. Convenience seems to be…

>> What prevents the existence of such an ecosystem?

It's in the OP and in my post: "anticompetitive DRM lock-in". Lack of interoperability.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#169

Post by philsnow »

eslaught wrote: post #92
taeric wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I covered this in other threads, basically. In truth, I was largely responding to this angle at the outset. DRM feels like a red herring that almost certainly exists due to demands from publishing houses. (I'll have to check to see if you can get any non-DRM files from libraries. My expectation is going to be a big no on that from any library that lends out audio books.) The odd complaint here is that the authors are…

A 40% cut makes sense in a world where Amazon pays the voice actor. My understanding is that is not how this works. The author pays the voice actor, or the publisher does. Amazon is paying for hosting an audio file, basically, and the development of the player app, and that's it. I think in the very early days, Amazon may have paid all the voice actors itself (because no one was on board with audio yet at that point)…

I really don't want to defend Amazon's practices on this, but

> Amazon is paying for hosting an audio file, basically, and the development of the player app, and that's it.

"development of the player app" is kind of load-bearing in that sentence:

They host a directory of books and provide recommendations (which amounts to lead-gen, probably (?) increasing the number of copies of your book that sell because users stumble upon it either by browsing or by searching for keywords).

They take payments (not a high bar, but that's 1-3% if you wanted to do it "yourself", not to mention the cost of either integrating with a payment provider yourself or paying somebody to do it, so it shouldn't be forgotten about).

Finally, their model where you pay a subscription that gets you a credit per month or whatever leads to even more book sales. I hate this model and I finally ejected myself from the Audible ecosystem, but before I did I spent a bunch of credits that I had saved up.

Re: Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

#170

Post by TylerE »

bombcar wrote: post #108
taeric wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have a box of a lot of books on tape we found in a garage sale around here. Had to get a tape player for the kids to listen to them, as they were the kind where they had the books with them, too. Was a ton of fun, if a touch annoying to deal with rewinding the tape and such. We also still have more than a few books on CD. We don't get as many as we used to, ironically, since it is far more convenient to use…

Exactly. You can still find a few devices that did it (often out of Japan, especially minidisk players, for example), but most had no permanent memory or only a few bytes for radio stations, and of course you can't write to a CD. Many car CD-players handled it just fine.

Every car stereo I've had for at least the past decade automatically saves the position when you turn the car off.
Post reply on HN