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

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

#81

Post by taeric »

mtlynch wrote: post #71
taeric wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious why you don't think they aren't better than the alternatives? Are they amazing and beyond improvement? Of course not. But most of the alternatives are crap. This is basically the same as the sad affair of enterprise software. The vast majority of that industry is actively bad. Not just not good, but actively bad.

> I am curious why you don't think they aren't better than the alternatives? Are they amazing and beyond improvement? Of course not. But most of the alternatives are crap. Do you think the quality of the alternatives might be related to the fact that Amazon/Audible is strangling all competitors out of existence with their exclusivity agreements? Imagine if an audiobook competitor popped up that's a 10x better experie…

No. I think the quality of the alternatives is largely because it is expensive to make the publishing houses happy with licensing fees to be able to offer their work.

This isn't even that controversial of a take. Netflix doesn't offer a ton of the things I used to be able to get in DVD from them, because the publishing houses have very high demands on licensing fees.

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

#83

Post by taeric »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #73
taeric wrote: post #5

I have a hard time getting behind some of these criticisms of audible and the like. Its annoying, as I am against most DRM schemes out there. But to pretend those came from "big tech" is laughable, at best. A ridiculously large portion of "tech" is perfectly fine with sending copies everywhere. Is literally how many of us get our operating system. Music files and shareware copying were huge before the internet. Mod f…

How about Brandon Sanderson's criticism of Audible? [1] > If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.) > Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of…

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 upset at getting a smaller share of a smaller sell, that is in a much larger sea of sales. They acknowledge that they make more money from audio books sold at audible, even with this cut.

This also does a shit job of showing the break down to the performers that are reading the book. If those are paid externally to the 40% that goes to the author, I really don't know how to take the complaints seriously other than greed on the authors that are talking about it.

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

#84

Post by omgmajk »

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 default to podcasts or essays from youtube in that case because if I miss something it's not the end of the world.

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

#85

Post by freedomben »

danem wrote: post #37
hgomersall wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paywall is not DRM.

How is it meaningfully different? Both exist to ensure that each person consuming the media has paid for it. Sure, in practice pay-walled articles can be easily copied to non-drmed formats, but no one does this and the motivation is the same.

It's meaningfully different because once the access is confirmed, it respects you. You can easily save a copy forever. You could even copy/paste from it. DRM specifically makes it impossible for you to do that. It just doesn't just verify that you paid, it blocks and interferes what you can do with the content.

It doesn't become DRM just because some people choose not to make a backup copy. That would be like saying everything I can see with my eyes but choose not to photograph has DRM on it (or effectively is DRM). That's clearly not true, as I could at any time decide to photograph my surroundings and the objects I'm photographing aren't going to restrict my camera.

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

#86

Post by mandmandam »

kam wrote: post #55
flir wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years back they were one of the big voices sounding the alarm about electronic voting. Now, according to them, that's an alt-right conspiracy theory. Not gonna lie, that annoyed me.

They stopped sounding the alarm because they largely won that battle: The previous electronic voting machines everyone objected to had no paper trail and there was no way to verify that they were trustworthy. Modern electronic voting systems count paper ballots, and a recount can verify them by hand.

Riiight. That's probably why we stopped doing exit polls, after many double digit discrepancies in 2016.

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

#87

Post by slowmovintarget »

taeric wrote: post #83
slowmovintarget wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Brandon Sanderson's criticism of Audible? [1] > If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.) > Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of…

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…

The performers get paid up-front for the performance. This typically costs the author somewhere in the neighborhood of $10K to $40K including production costs.

Amazon originally paid out 70% like most other digital goods purveyors. Once they cornered the market they arbitrarily pushed it down to 25% (you only get 40% if you agree not to sell anywhere else). This means that for many authors, especially indie authors, they lose money publishing the audio version of their book.

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

#88

Post by wffurr »

diatribist wrote: post #25
stblack wrote: post #3

Related to this, Cory Doctorow's appearance on Future Tense podcast (Australia) is truly excellent. After being introduced, he goes on an 8-minute disquisition. We should all aspire to rap tech like Cory Doctorow can. https://pca.st/yr3hd7f9

The issue with most folks selling books about how to avoid the excesses of DRM and other exploitative practices is that most people are happy to pay a premium for the convenience of having a digital library managed by Amazon, Google, Facebook, &etc. Big tech companies must pay the bills for their servers in one way or another and charging people money to keep the data in their digital vaults is a tradeoff most consum…

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.

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

#89

Post by belorn »

taeric wrote: post #79
belorn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other previous articles? As for the last point, that one is not about Audible, so... what are we even discussing here? The article last argument, which is after discussing DRM and monopolies where users are captured into a locked market, is that google and apple has a 30% tax. They don't go into any depth over why a general 30% tax in a third-party market is bad in a duopoly situation, presumably because they do…

I've seen complaints on Audible for a few years, at this point? Surprised if this is news to you. Though, I also wouldn't be too shocked if folks skip past audio book news that don't listen to audio books. What do you mean the point wasn't on Audible, btw? The article is literally about how he is proud he isn't putting his book with Audible because of DRM? This is painted as if it is a choice of Amazon's, but it is h…

When you mean other articles, are you talking about this author?

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

#90

Post by freedomben »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #74
wlesieutre wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem isn't just with the royalty rates, it's making the default rate so low and using it as leverage to push authors into exclusivity contracts. Imagine if Apple started telling companies "You have to pay us a 60% cut, unless you agree to not have an Android app in which case we'll do 30% instead." You could argue that Apple is entitled to make that arrangement because they essentially created the mobile app so…

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).

You're of course technically right, but I would argue that in practice Audible is also a gatekeeper due to their dominant and successful position (though of course to a lesser degree than Apple). I have family members and friends that will not even consider buying an audiobook if it's not on Audible. That's a testament to Audible's good work at making a good platform, and I believe Audible deserves to be in the position they are in. But, I do think they have effective gatekeeper status, and a lot of that is a result of their exclusivity practices. By ensuring that there can't be any other audiobook store out there that has all the books a person wants, and that you can't sideload a book into your Audible library that you purchased elsewhere, they force a high level of inconvenience on anybody who wants to buy a book somewhere else.
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