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Audiblegate

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Re: Audiblegate

#251

Post by ryukoposting »

ALittleLight wrote: post #27

I worked on a tool at Amazon once that incorrectly calculated royalties, not because Amazon was greedily trying to steal from publishers, but just because of general incompetence (or, lack of sufficient competence maybe). Basically, of the people who wrote the tool, tested the tool, and used the tool, none of them knew exactly how royalties should be calculated and none of them could tell whether or not they were bei…

One of the things I will never understand is software companies' insistence at throwing engineers at any and all problems, and leaving them to their own devices. For example: accounting problems, for which society has accountants.

Re: Audiblegate

#252

Post by playpause »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #182
playpause wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your housemate doesn't re-listen the recorded book, doesn't make edits, doesn't clear up passages, cut and rearrange unwanted silences? He is either wildly underestimating it by only taking the "talk into a microphone" part in consideration, or I feel terribly sorry for anyone listening to his audiobooks.

He's constantly listening out for mispronunciations, unwanted pace changes, mouth noises etc. He frequently has to stop the narrator, listen to it back, get them to do a whole bit again... That's why it can take up to 3 hours just to get one hour of audio down. Not 5-12 hours though.

Re: Audiblegate

#253

Post by subw00f »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #218
gambiting wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I genuienly think that the author expects Amazon to just eat the cost of returned books. Looking at their other arguments, I guess it's simply because "they can afford it". And while that's true, I don't see any reason why it should work this way - even actual real life bookstores return unsold books to publisher and the publisher has to eat that cost.

And that’s a good thing, because it gives publishers incentive to put out quality products. I’m convinced almost anything originating on Twitter is knee jerk alarmism. People need to understand that the people making these tweets have incentive to create outrage for more exposure/followers. “Introducing Audiblegate” - Maybe I’m jaded, but you JUST KNOW they were hoping someone like The Verge would eat that up as a he…

>because it gives publishers incentive to put out quality products

I wouldn't say quality products, lowest common denominator and all.

Re: Audiblegate

#254

Post by lolinder »

alphabetting wrote: post #242
sdoering wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree more. Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weapponize public opinion for personal gain. I know from other, let's call the traditional, authors that classical book royalties were more in the 10 - 20 percent range for printed books. The upper range if you were a long published best seller with bargaining power. So I was already irritated when he stated that…

> Also this person scandalizing and stirring things up sounded to me like trying to weaponize public opinion for personal gain. What is the potential gain of going after audible as an author?

They explicitly say in the thread that they're trying to get enough people angry that Audible changes the deal.

Re: Audiblegate

#255

Post by Dave3of5 »

germanier wrote: post #235
Dave3of5 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a unit test? Most companies now-a-days don't write spec up front. That's called Big Design up Front (BDUF) and it was seen in this industry that this was prone to failure which could cause the whole project to fail. That's because it's impossible to know everything up front and often during the project the requirements will change as the stakeholders learn…

In cases like this, the spec already exists though: in form of binding contracts. Lawyers already took that matter into their hand and created that spec. Customers agreed to it. Not translating them into technical requirements early in the process is usually followed with a world of pain.

This isn't a way that software is typically made.

The contract will most likely be done and dev are not normally involved and it'll be written after the process of the software being made. I don't think in 16 years I've ever gone through a legal contract and translated that into a technical requirement.

It's normally done the other way round that some requirement is translated into legalese. Reading legal documents is not a skill I would expect of any developer and I would be extremely wary of building software using this technique. Reading contracts requires many years of training that almost all developers do not have. Also note that laws are not universal and different jurisdictions will often allow different interpretations. An example of this is USA vs UK law, they are quite different and so if you are trying to interpret a USA contract as some from the UK you'll probably need a lawyer from the US on hand to help explain what they mean by certain terms. Without this training it can be very easy to misinterpret what is actually being said in a legal document. I'd also say that as a dev/po/pm/qa or basically anyone involved in the actual development it's not in my job description to be able to read legal documents so I'd be quite within my rights to refuse to do this work.

The point I made which you seem to be ignoring is that from the original Agile Manifesto:

"Working software over comprehensive documentation"

So you don't write a spec document up front but discover the requirements as you progress through the project. I suspect for Amazon this is exactly what they are doing there is no "spec document" and there was no contract but as they progressed through the project they just built a overly simplistic approach to the Royalty calc. Afterwards they got a contract written and the lawyer either wasn't told what the software actually done or just wrote what was the standard industry contract for Royalties.

Please Note: I'm not advocating for Agile vs any other technique but I was responding to the comment that you should just read a spec and code that directly into code that's just not the way you do things in an Agile environment.

Re: Audiblegate

#256

Post by IgorPartola »

AitchEmArsey wrote: post #217
radicalbyte wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Domain-Driven Design > It's not exactly rocket-science either I'd imagine that occasionally "rocket science" is exactly what it is!

This always baffled me. Rocket science is basically F = GMm/d^2 with m changing over time as you burn fuel and also thrust vectoring. Where is the complexity?

Re: Audiblegate

#257

Post by conor_f »

selfhoster11 wrote: post #211
conor_f wrote: post #197

Can everyone please just stop using Amazon products already? I'm sick of hearing people complain about them and still say "but they're too convenient" or "I've no other option!". You do. Stop using Amazon and related products. Tell everyone you can to stop using Amazon and related products.

Point me to an Audible alternative that has remotely as good selection and pricing in the UK, and I'll have a look at it. I don't like the subscription model and wish there was an alternative.

It's your job to be a responsible consumer and find alternatives that best suit your needs. It's quite likely you won't find one that has the Amazon selection and pricing, but that's because people are taking the cheap, easy option and exclusively contributing to the monopoly of Amazon instead of supporting alternatives.

A company like Amazon is not ethical. There's too many examples of disgusting practices from them to even count. Stop supporting them and find alternatives.

It won't be the cheapest, it won't have next-day delivery, it won't have as encompassing of a selection, but all of these come at huge human cost when you're talking about it on an Amazon scale.

[edit] Libraries offer a way to borrow audiobooks for free. Check https://www.overdrive.com/libraries to look for your local library's selection. Will definitely hit your pricing requirement and hopefully the selection requirement too!

Re: Audiblegate

#258

Post by troupe »

matsemann wrote: post #106
jsnell wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site has more details in other articles. They're not worth reading. There's no substance just a lot of charged language. And I'm really annoyed at spending any time at all on reading this. The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of c…

> Apparently that floor is being hit every time, i.e. Audible is paying them more than they are actually required by the contract. The author thinks this is a smoking gun that proves how they're being cheated, which is an odd take. You think it is fair that Amazon sets an arbitrary low price, and then makes the authors take the cost. That's an odder take. If Amazon wants to sell their tokens at price X, have a campai…

If you want to sell your book for $25, then putting it on a site where people get one book per month for $15 is stupid. They are literally agreeing to sell it for less than the list price in order to have access to Audible's customer base--many of whom are there specifically as subscribers to get one book for $15 per month.

Re: Audiblegate

#259

Post by troupe »

jsnell wrote: post #15
axxl wrote: post #11

The twitter thread and the accompanying website don't quite tell me what's going on besides 'not as much money as expected'. But I can't quite see what the 'Net Sales' problem is, it's just stated as "less money" for no reason? Although I am tired so maybe something just isn't clicking. I don't doubt that the terms of the deal are poor though. I had wondered for a while how the credit system worked, and if the increa…

The site has more details in other articles. They're not worth reading. There's no substance just a lot of charged language. And I'm really annoyed at spending any time at all on reading this. The narrators don't get paid by the retail price (and the contract doesn't suggest they would). Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among the books that the credits were spent on in proportion to the number of c…

Audible is specifically a service where you can get one book per month by paying $15 per month. If you want to sell your book for $50, then you should probably list it somewhere that all sales are for $50. Presumably this author thinks it is worth listing his book on Audible vs. the other ways he could sell it. Alternatively he might just not be very good at math or reading contracts.

Re: Audiblegate

#260

Post by RankingMember »

thereddaikon wrote: post #244

Not a judgement on the content of the post, but is anyone else annoyed at the lazy trend to dub any controversy "something"-gate? Watergate was called that because that's the name of the hotel. Gate is not some synonym for scandal. It's just a gate. We used to have more appropriate names for things. At least the Panama Papers had a proper name, even if everyone forgot about it and nothing ever came of it.

Totally. It's like "you're an author, fella, be creative!" Here's one I just came up with: Fraudible! Gets the point across and doesn't perpetuate this weird "-gate" scheme. Also rolls off the tongue a lot nicer if I do say so myself.
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