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Amazon’s Echo Chamber

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Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#81

Post by sireat »

Try being a small book publisher and dealing with Amazon. It feels like living in Google or Paypal customer service world(ie if you are an edge case we do not want you).

I've been helping a non-profit publish some books on Amazon and it has been rather trying.

It is silly, the book comes out great printed through Amazon Createspace and looks great on Kindle, but it gets taken off Kindle Direct Publishing because it is not using English or one of the handful of supported languages.

Why not let people use other languages if they mark the e-book appropriately?

The official Amazon answer has been that they can not guarantee quality in other languages and thus they do not support it.

The problem is that unless you are using one of the limited number of official language Amazon will delete your e-book. https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119

Welsh writers managed to raise up enough of a stink about it: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/amazon-sparks-l...

Still it seems ridiculous that only way to get decent CS is through PR.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#82

Post by bkirkby »

where the author sees an echo chamber that portrays false success, i see a bias on behalf of the author that blinds him to some seemingly obvious truths. others have already pointed out the demonstrably false assertion that "no one makes money selling media for consumption any more." a statement like that seems to only be able to come from a blind spot.

i bought 7 kindle fires for my household (i have 6 kids) largely because it's the best deal you can get on a tablet and it performs it's function extremely well (i.e. media consumption device coupled with some games here and there). i don't think any objective measure of kindle fire can relegate it to failure just because it doesn't have the premium experience you get with a tablet that is 6 times the price. i personally do not think the apple experience is worth 6 times the price.

i've no idea if the the fire tv stick is going to be a good device, but the fact that it cost me $20 coupled with the positive media experience i get on our multiple fire tablets was enough to get me to buy one and try it out.

similarly, i can get amazon echo for $99 and i just signed up to try it out. i've long wanted a device with the presence and interface of a star trek computer. i'm skeptical that the technology is there yet to provide the kind of experience that i know will enhance the life of my family, but it's promise is exactly what i want and i don't see anyone else out there trying it esp. at the price point.

i think it's a bit myopic to relegate all of amazon's hardware strategy to the failure bin just because they had a clear failure in the fire phone. the other devices all seem to offer compelling reasons to try them out (not the least of which is price point).

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#83

Post by cwyers »

vidarh wrote: post #79
cwyers wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everyone who would be in the market for this kind of a device already has something in their pocket with access to Google Now or Siri, though. Why use Echo when you have to be in a certain room?

Because when you're in that room you don't need to get your device out of your pocket? But I don't buy that almost everyone will have it in their pocket, given the number of times I see people looking for their phones all over the place.

$200 is an awful lot to spend to keep from having to look for your phone while in just one room of your house.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#84

Post by cwyers »

mcphage wrote: post #70
cwyers wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon does a clumsy job at a lot of things. It's incredible. Their shipping and logistics? Top notch. Their server operations, including AWS? Very good. Their website UI? Pants. Utterly pants. Using the Prime Instant website to watch video and using Netflix to watch video is like the difference between night and day. Netflix is well-organized, provides helpful recommendations, and has meaningful categories. Amazon,…

Is pants good? Or bad? Or... what?

Pants is bad, yeah.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#85

Post by unclebucknasty »

cwyers wrote: post #83
vidarh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when you're in that room you don't need to get your device out of your pocket? But I don't buy that almost everyone will have it in their pocket, given the number of times I see people looking for their phones all over the place.

$200 is an awful lot to spend to keep from having to look for your phone while in just one room of your house.

Right. It also struck me as funny in the video that the Echo had moved into their bedroom. Did they buy two? Or are they carting the thing around the house with them (instead of their phones)?

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#86

Post by hkarthik »

patio11 wrote: post #25
hkarthik wrote: post #7

Scathing and harsh, but probably pretty accurate. > No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore. That market is quickly and brutally dying. The media market is now so efficient that all profit is completely sucked out of the equation by the time you get to the consumption delivery system, to the point that it is barely possible to break even. This part resonated with me a lot. The media market was always…

No one makes money selling media for consumption anymore. This is a common belief among people in tech. It is also disastrously false. Frozen has sold 1.2 billion dollars worth of tickets. The related IP alone, to say nothing of merchandising, will be sold for decades to come, and bring in additional billions. You know the DVD, a dead format that can be trivially pirated? Yeah, they sold 3.2 million copies of Frozen.…

For every Frozen, there are probably a hundred thousand failed media projects that didn't turn a profit. This is an outlier. And most of the profit ended up in the hands of the creators (Disney), not the distributors (everyone else).

Distribution of media is just not a profitable enterprise now. Too many closed, competing ecosystems and the entrenched now have so much capital acquired from other, more profitable ventures (Google from Search/Advertising, Apple from Hardware), that it makes little sense for anyone else to try unless they plan to be really different or disruptive.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#87

Post by vidarh »

cwyers wrote: post #83
vidarh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because when you're in that room you don't need to get your device out of your pocket? But I don't buy that almost everyone will have it in their pocket, given the number of times I see people looking for their phones all over the place.

$200 is an awful lot to spend to keep from having to look for your phone while in just one room of your house.

Lots of people spend far more than that on fairly frivolous things.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#88

Post by cwyers »

vidarh wrote: post #87
cwyers wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$200 is an awful lot to spend to keep from having to look for your phone while in just one room of your house.

Lots of people spend far more than that on fairly frivolous things.

How does the Echo even rise to the standard of frivolity? A far better word for it is "superfluous."

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#89

Post by apta »

As a previous employee at Amazon, I was extremely surprised at the quality of how they write software internally. When I heard about their new phone endeavor while still there, I was not expecting anything to come out of it quality wise, at least from the software side, and it seems they compromised on the hardware side as well (I never examined one up close). I think anyone that has worked at Amazon, and seen their internal processes would not be surprised at this either.

Re: Amazon’s Echo Chamber

#90

Post by girvo »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #54
girvo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is exactly why Netflix for example is moving into content production. Does amazon do the same?

Amazon has a number of self-produced shows. Also, they have an interesting "pilot" season where they put out the first episode of a half dozen or so shows and then let people vote on which one get produced into a full season. The quality of them is on an uptick as well. 'Transparent' has been getting a good deal of critical attention and 'Tumbleleaf' an old school by hand stop-motion animated production is just incre…

Awesome. That's exactly what the big tech companies need to do if they want to break the media monopolies we have currently!
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