[HN Gopher] Audiblegate
___________________________________________________________________
Audiblegate
Author : merlinscholz
Score : 767 points
Date : 2022-02-15 11:28 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| chrispeel wrote:
| I used to use Audible, then I got a few public library cards
| (they're easy to get), and now use Libby on mobile and desktop
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Libby is incredible. I hope others know about it.
| BR-549 wrote:
| I was considering signing up for an Audible account. I'd never
| heard of Libby but it looks great, I will be using that
| instead. Thank you!
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| My library has a crappy selection though. Not Hardly even worth
| even checking if they have a book, because they won't.
| chrispeel wrote:
| I live in California, where I can get a card for the SF and
| LA public libraries, in addition to those where I live. I'm
| sure it's not that way for everyone...
| wildzzz wrote:
| I do like using Libby for books that don't have a long hold
| list and those that are very short. I absolutely hate wasting
| an Audible token on a 2 or 3hr book, I'll drop a token on
| something like a 51hr Tom Clancy book or just books I'm too
| impatient to wait weeks for.
| harryf wrote:
| Thanks for the tip on Libby. I tried Audible on iOS for a while
| and found the UX too annoying. I can't remember specifics but
| in general I remember it was annoying to use with AirPods while
| using my phone for other things. Felt like it needed to learn
| some lessons from Apple Music or Spotify
| Ansil849 wrote:
| > a bizarre returns policy, where the consumer could return their
| AB whenever they pleased, and the PRODUCER shouldered the cost.
|
| I don't understand, what's supposed to be bizarre about this
| policy? Why the seemingly snarky "where the consumer could return
| their AB whenever they pleased" comment?
| altairprime wrote:
| I believe what's bizarre about the policy is the following:
|
| 1. Buyer pays Amazon $xx for sale of audiobook.
|
| 2. Amazon credits publisher $xx and debits published 40-83% of
| $xx for handling fees.
|
| 3. Buyer is refunded $xx by Amazon
|
| 4. Amazon debits publisher $xx.
|
| So as I understand the thread, Amazon is doing the equivalent
| of charging a 'restocking fee' equal to their share of the sale
| price, so that the publisher ends up paying out of pocket.
|
| (Corrections welcome if I misread here.)
| Ansil849 wrote:
| Ah, I understand now, yes that makes sense. If Amazon is not
| refunding the handling fees to the publisher, that's indeed
| unfair. Though that seems like the issue should be firmly
| between the publisher and Amazon/Audible, I don't see why
| they also took a shot at the consumer with the glib "where
| the consumer could return their AB whenever they pleased"
| comment.
| trymas wrote:
| .. 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.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| Flippantly, it doesn't sound like they're shafting their users
| by disallowing people who are not their users from reading
| their threads.
| nerdbaggy wrote:
| Best case scenario a publisher will get 40% of the sale. That
| seems extremely low.
| atty wrote:
| I am confused. I spent a decent amount of time reading the thread
| and the linked article, and I see no proof, only an accusation
| that Amazon/Audible are manipulating their calculation of "Net
| Sales" in "shady ways". Is the accusation that people are getting
| paid a percentage of an audible credit instead of a percentage of
| the retail price when a credit is used? Or that they don't get
| paid when someone returns a purchase? Because those both seem
| very obviously how it should work and not at all a -gate
| situation. If someone has a better understanding of the root
| problem, I'd be very happy for a short explanation.
| davnn wrote:
| I feel the same. It's really strange that the ,,forensic
| accountant" suggests to calculate the royalty from the retail
| price, is that common practice anywhere? At least in my
| country, everything business related is calculated from the net
| prices.
|
| However, what may not be clear for creators is that they will
| mostly sell their books cheaper than retail because of the
| subscriptions.
|
| I don't understand the hype/gate.
| avazhi wrote:
| 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
| powerful than Google AdWords or Amazon listings. Distribute on
| your own website.
|
| Crying about unfair bargaining power or exploitation - welcome to
| the real world, kiddo. There are plenty of criticisms one could
| level at Amazon (See Nina Khan's law review article for a good
| synopsis). Amazon's contractual terms vis-a-vis Audiobooks (as
| usual freely consented to by the authors) isn't one of them, IMO.
|
| Now if Amazon isn't paying its authors the contractually
| stipulated price, that's obviously different, but this guy's
| problem seems to originate with his perception that the royalty
| split is innately unfair.
| mdoms wrote:
| > If your book is good, it'll get noticed
|
| This is a fantasy.
| phs318u wrote:
| I don't doubt that Amazon's practices are shady. Creating obscure
| and complex pricing plans out of seemingly straightforward fees
| has become something of an art-form on AWS. Who here has not been
| hit with an unexpected charge?
|
| What I honestly find hard to believe though, is the popularity of
| audio-books. How do you all focus on the material if you're doing
| other things? Or am I mistakenly assuming the mode of consumption
| i.e. the audio-books are primarily listened to by those who don't
| have the time to read?
| boobsbr wrote:
| I just listen to then when I'm doing menial work, like doing
| the dishes, or folding clothes; or when I'm lying in bed.
| [deleted]
| riffraff wrote:
| I listen to them during walks and commute, or while cooking. I
| live with the fact that I may miss some bits because of lack of
| focus.
|
| It's not so much lack of time to read as much as enjoying a
| book-like experience while doing other things: I also read
| normal books.
|
| It's also worth saying that some audio productions are not just
| dronish narration. Multiple voices actors, effects, music etc
| make for a different experience than the book itself. E.g. the
| "Sandman" audio production on audible is pretty great (although
| I hate the voice of Death).
| jjulius wrote:
| >How do you all focus on the material if you're doing other
| things? Or am I mistakenly assuming the mode of consumption
| i.e. the audio-books are primarily listened to by those who
| don't have the time to read?
|
| I'm not an audiobook person, but I know quite a few people who
| listen to them during their commutes.
| anyfoo wrote:
| I'm of the variety where I consciously listen to _every_ word,
| thinking it wouldn 't be in the book if it was irrelevant. That
| may seem extreme, but the difference between missing a word and
| missing entire sentences is tiny when it comes to audiobooks
| and podcasts. There's a lot of rewinding.
|
| So when do I listen to them? When driving, when eating, when
| exercising, when doing chores that don't require much thought
| (laundry, folding, dishes, cleaning, ...), brushing teeth,
| walking to somewhere... there's a _lot_ of time to listen to
| books and podcasts, even though it becomes pretty much
| infeasible the moment something requires actual thought, and
| even though I don 't commute anymore.
| jacksonkmarley wrote:
| > How do you all focus on the material if you're doing other
| things?
|
| I listen when what I am doing does not require conscious
| thought. Driving a car, going for a walk, repetitive exercise.
|
| Also, I can actually focus on a somewhat dry topic better if I
| have something mentally undemanding going on in the background,
| I don't get bored as easily.
|
| In fact in many cases listening to an audio book while e.g.
| driving makes both pastimes better than they would be alone.
| wildzzz wrote:
| I listen to lots of novels and podcasts during my long commute
| or when I'm doing chores, the types of mindless activities you
| are normally doing idle thinking. It's more difficult to pay
| attention to them when I'm driving in heavy city traffic but
| it's easy on the highway. It's really easy to wash dishes, fold
| laundry, or vacuum when listening to something. I mostly like
| doing novels with lots of narrative prose because it's hard to
| listen to something like a self-help or technical subject
| audiobook when you can't easily reread a sentence or quickly
| look at a diagram. Having long blocks of narrative prose let
| you miss some things when your attention wanders rather than
| missing dialogue where you may miss some important part of the
| story. Books that do rely on visual aids include PDFs for you
| to browse but that's very difficult to do unless you are just
| sitting down doing absolutely nothing.
|
| When I was working from home everyday at the start of the
| pandemic, I was building up a large backlog of podcasts and was
| not able to keep up with audiobooks I had rented from my local
| library through Overdrive.
| alar44 wrote:
| Are you seriously asking how someone can listen to something
| and do another thing at the same time?
| ramchip wrote:
| Isn't it the same as podcasts? I listen while exercising,
| folding laundry, standing in a commuter train, etc.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| My mum was a textile artist, which means she spent a lot of her
| time looping bits of string through other bits of string. She
| listened to audio books because her hands could do all the
| looping by themselves with minimal required attention.
| yessirwhatever wrote:
| I'm no fan of audible but what you're saying here is just epic-
| style whining that you're not getting what you want, in which
| case I'll tell you to stop putting your audiobooks on Audible and
| stop your whining.
|
| In regards to returns, I like that policy. Not sure why you
| you're being snarky about it.
|
| To call this Audiblegate is like calling a fart a nuclear
| explosion.
| [deleted]
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| I've used downpour for years and it's a great service. Drm free
| downloads as well if you don't want to use their app and a
| massive selection
| belter wrote:
| Please stop
|
| ...communicating...
|
| via ...
|
| multiple ...
|
| twitter posts...
|
| please...
|
| ... write an article, blog, book, youtube video
|
| anything but these spread out posts.
| [deleted]
| adamors wrote:
| I've started flagging these submissions, it's incredibly
| obnoxious to use Twitter without an account and if the author
| couldn't bother to use a longer format (there's even
| twitlonger!) I won't bother to read it.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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
| being calculated correctly. They weren't. We eventually figured
| out something was wrong and went through a very annoying process
| of learning about royalties and how they interplay with prices,
| discounts, and other factors and then set things right.
|
| Still, if I were paid by Amazon royalties in any capacity I would
| carefully double check their math and read the fine print.
|
| 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. There's also high turnover, so it's very easy to be
| the person on your team with the longest tenure and also be
| mostly in the dark about how your services should and do work. As
| I say, maybe it's greed, but I would never rule out the people
| responsible just not understanding (or doing) what they should be
| doing.
| drakonka wrote:
| I self-publish on Amazon and there are so many recurring
| instances of royalties not being properly recorded and paid
| out, mostly in Kindle Unlimited. Page reads don't get recorded
| due to some apparent incident (sometimes admitted by Amazon,
| other times completely ignored despite it being obvious that
| something is off in reporting on a large scale), and when the
| problem is fixed and we start seeing proper reads again we just
| have to accept that we're collectively out of luck and will not
| be compensated for the missing hours/days of page reads. Trying
| to contact Amazon about this has been completely useless.
|
| This is one of the reasons for the uptick of new and
| experienced authors ditching (or making plans to ditch) Amazon
| KU exclusivity and going wide.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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 them that it didn't warrant to be written. Welp. And a few
| iterations after we were still hitting blocks of "what ? didn't
| you know that in case of X you do Y?" due to us being outside
| of their field.
|
| Real world systems are hard. I'd still blame Amazon for not
| having caught these issues very early in the process, that's on
| them. But bugs and gross calculation errors are par for the
| course.
| [deleted]
| radicalbyte wrote:
| 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).
| AitchEmArsey wrote:
| > Domain-Driven Design
|
| > It's not exactly rocket-science either
|
| I'd imagine that occasionally "rocket science" is exactly
| what it is!
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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?
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are
| qualified to make a rocket. -Wernher von Braun
| slantview wrote:
| Because they are using 16 bit unsigned integers?
| mark-r wrote:
| Didn't you know that 87% of statistics are made up on the
| spot?
| mannerheim wrote:
| From a similar point of view, you could say fluid
| mechanics is basically just F=ma.
|
| Even just orbital mechanics has a decent amount of
| complexity. Transfer between celestial bodies in general
| requires solving the three-body problem (or four for
| transfer between planets). And it's one thing to solve
| for just the trajectory of an object given some initial
| conditions, and another to figure out the correct initial
| conditions to give to get the trajectory you want, all
| the while staying within a fuel budget. Then you have to
| contend with not having instantaneous impulse in real
| life.
|
| A simplification here is that you can get a decent
| approximation to the three/four-body problem with patched
| conics, which is where you assume that the gravity
| outside of a celestial body's 'sphere of influence' is
| zero, and within that SOI, all of the gravity comes from
| that body; in this way, you can treat it as a series of
| two body problems, where you 'patch' together the
| solutions (which are conic sections) for the orbital
| trajectories of the all the bodies involved. This is by
| no means a perfect approximation, though, and in practice
| I would expect that one would want to check a given
| solution found with patched conics with a more complete
| n-body simulation.
|
| Even simpler than this, though, at least mathematically,
| is orbital rendezvous. Here, you only have to contend
| with the gravity of a single body. Yet it's very
| difficult to get the timing right, and the first couple
| attempts by the USSR and the US failed, and Buzz Aldrin
| even submitted a doctoral thesis based entirely around
| orbital rendezvous (two spacecraft meeting in Earth
| orbit):
|
| > In its first human spaceflight program Vostok, the
| Soviet Union launched pairs of spacecraft from the same
| launch pad, one or two days apart (Vostok 3 and 4 in
| 1962, and Vostok 5 and 6 in 1963). In each case, the
| launch vehicles' guidance systems inserted the two craft
| into nearly identical orbits; however, this was not
| nearly precise enough to achieve rendezvous, as the
| Vostok lacked maneuvering thrusters to adjust its orbit
| to match that of its twin. The initial separation
| distances were in the range of 5 to 6.5 kilometers (3.1
| to 4.0 mi), and slowly diverged to thousands of
| kilometers (over a thousand miles) over the course of the
| missions.[1][2]
|
| > In 1963 Buzz Aldrin submitted his doctoral thesis
| titled, Line-Of-Sight Guidance Techniques For Manned
| Orbital Rendezvous.[3] As a NASA astronaut, Aldrin worked
| to "translate complex orbital mechanics into relatively
| simple flight plans for my colleagues."[4]
|
| > First attempt failed
|
| > The first attempt at rendezvous was made on June 3,
| 1965, when US astronaut Jim McDivitt tried to maneuver
| his Gemini 4 craft to meet its spent Titan II launch
| vehicle's upper stage. McDivitt was unable to get close
| enough to achieve station-keeping, due to depth-
| perception problems, and stage propellant venting which
| kept moving it around.[5] However, the Gemini 4 attempts
| at rendezvous were unsuccessful largely because NASA
| engineers had yet to learn the orbital mechanics involved
| in the process. Simply pointing the active vehicle's nose
| at the target and thrusting was unsuccessful. If the
| target is ahead in the orbit and the tracking vehicle
| increases speed, its altitude also increases, actually
| moving it away from the target. The higher altitude then
| increases orbital period due to Kepler's third law,
| putting the tracker not only above, but also behind the
| target. The proper technique requires changing the
| tracking vehicle's orbit to allow the rendezvous target
| to either catch up or be caught up with, and then at the
| correct moment changing to the same orbit as the target
| with no relative motion between the vehicles (for
| example, putting the tracker into a lower orbit, which
| has a shorter orbital period allowing it to catch up,
| then executing a Hohmann transfer back to the original
| orbital height).[6]
|
| > As GPO engineer Andre Meyer later remarked, "There is a
| good explanation for what went wrong with rendezvous."
| The crew, like everyone else at MSC, "just didn't
| understand or reason out the orbital mechanics involved.
| As a result, we all got a whole lot smarter and really
| perfected rendezvous maneuvers, which Apollo now uses."
| hattar wrote:
| Aerodynamics issues likely add a lot of complexity,
| though I'm sure there are plenty of other factors that
| make launching a rocket hard.
| pc86 wrote:
| This might be the most stereotypically HN comment I've
| ever read. Not in a good way.
| samatman wrote:
| Well, if you picture a spherical, frictionless rocket
| scientist, in a vacuum...
| ateng wrote:
| If you just model rocket science as a point mass with
| variable m then yes...
|
| But it's more than that. To name a few: * How does one
| raise the thrust temperature as high as possible without
| melting the engine to maximise thrust? (The burning
| temperature IS already higher than the engine material
| melting point) * how does one reduce the redundancy (both
| system wise and material wise) to minimise weight while
| ensuring the rocket won't fail?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Ah so you want aeronautical engineering, not rocket
| science!
| imwillofficial wrote:
| You must be a troll
| IgorPartola wrote:
| I can see how you can think of me that way based on this
| discussion.
|
| I studied physics in undergrad and in classical dynamics
| we covered "rocket science" in these terms. The term is
| more or less a misnomer as science implies trying to
| understand how the universe works. Building rockets is
| engineering but studying their motion does rely on both
| the equation I gave above and also on fluid dynamics.
| From the point of view of "science" it is pretty simple.
| From the point of view I'd actually building a rocket the
| engineering is very hard. Since that time I've always had
| a bit of a chip on my shoulder about the "it's not rocket
| science". It also doesn't help that both my parents
| studied aerospace engineering in undergrad and grad
| school and tried to impart a decent chunk of it on my as
| a kid (which I resisted very hard).
| imwillofficial wrote:
| You simplified to an absurd level that does not reflect
| reality in the slightest. You did that to sound smart,
| and refused to concede when actual domain experts showed
| up to slap you down.
|
| I worked on a ballistic missile tracking software that
| would calculate areas of uncertainty given coverage of
| various defense mechanisms.
|
| It very much involved rocket scientists from JPL.
|
| You are wrong in every measurable sense of the word.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| > You did that to sound smart, and refused to concede
| when actual domain experts showed up to slap you down
|
| Sounds like I lost the asshole measuring contest :)
| imwillofficial wrote:
| HN has a vast amount of random talent. If you're going to
| speak with authority, you'd better know you're right! And
| if somebody comes in and upgrades your knowledge, be cool
| about it. They just did you a favor.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Thank you so much and I am so sorry for what I did. I
| didn't realize there were domain experts on HN. That's
| amazing and I can't believe I spoke on this subject
| without first checking if I was the smartest person in
| the room. What you added to the discussion is invaluable.
| You are a saint.
| pc86 wrote:
| Two unrelated things:
|
| 1. If HN had a friend system/social graph, you'd have a
| pending request from me based on this comment alone.
|
| 2. Fantastic domain name in your profile.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Thanks Shoot me an email to keep in touch
| samatman wrote:
| The "rocket scientist" became a metonym for a very
| intelligent and skilled professional during the Apollo
| program.
|
| Does that unbaffle your baffles (oh, yes, rocket
| scientists do have to deal with baffles! You left that
| out) or should I elaborate? Bless your heart, but it
| isn't exactly rocket science.
| morelisp wrote:
| Sorry, but domain-driven design is actually when you have
| "class Licensor; class Licensee; class RoyaltyPayment".
| What you're describing is competence and attention to
| detail, and that's too much to expect from development
| teams.
| regularfry wrote:
| And that's why DDD doesn't just involve development
| teams. It explicitly calls for people who are competent
| in the domain and know the details that need attention to
| be involved in the design process.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > that's too much to expect from development teams
|
| Wut? The development team is capable of dealing with that
| just fine. It's the business unit throwing requirements
| over the fence and hoping it'll magically be OK that's
| the problem.
| rob74 wrote:
| 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.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| > that the people talking to the customer are not the
| same people developing the application
|
| I think there can be some slack in this. I've had great
| success when product managers and UX designers worked
| closely tightly with engineers but were the only ones
| talking to customers/users. As long as their focus is on
| deeply understanding the domain and user needs it can
| work really well. I think XP describes this as something
| like a standin customer.
| radicalbyte wrote:
| In the first case: natural selection sort of works for
| products. If you want to survive you need to find a way.
|
| In the second case: that is a massive smell and time to
| find a new job. Which from the comments regards turnover
| at Amazon seems to be the case :-)
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You're right, but I think the hard part is still to find
| people to bridge the gap between the system experts and
| domain experts.
|
| An extreme example would be if you're trying to introduce a
| logistics management system in a shop that was exclusively
| using pen and paper. You'll need someone with a foot in
| both world to even get to the point where they can look at
| your models and/or documentation and say "yes, it matches
| the business".
|
| Or one of the participant in the project will need to
| become that person (ideally the client, we can dream).
| withinboredom wrote:
| As someone who has done this a few times from
| pen/paper/excel to actual DDD software, it's really not
| that hard to shoulder surf and ask lots of questions
| about edge cases. At least initially. Though my favorite
| answer to those questions is: "never happens." Thus you
| end up with `BobSaidNeverHappensException` just to be
| cute.
|
| But really, the software is there to solve a problem, so
| you end up shoulder surfing while the "expert" uses both
| systems simultaneously, and they're asking you questions
| and you're thinking about how you may rearrange the UI
| from their feedback. It's extremely iterative. The
| "domain expert" also becomes an expert with the software
| as they learn about all the things you implement.
| hvidgaard wrote:
| Usually this is solved by including domain experts on the
| development teams. Their responsibility is not to
| program, but to document and verify that the test cases
| are adequate. This is well known, but often ignored
| because it's expensive.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| Since you're so willing to share your experience, was your
| initial product overall saving Amazon royalties or causing them
| to pay out more in royalties?
| ALittleLight wrote:
| We were overpaying royalties. Contrary to the ideas in this
| thread, I think most of the people working at Amazon really
| do believe in earning customer trust and customer obsession.
| I never experienced anything even remotely like someone
| saying "We could earn a bit more by cheating!" And if I had,
| I would have felt complete confidence in raising a red flag
| to literally anyone above me in the org chart (though, of
| course, I would've gone in order). Conversely, I did
| experience many, many genuine people expressing earnest
| opinions about what they thought was best for the customer.
|
| I would not be surprised to learn that there are harsh or
| exploitative terms for audiobook publishers. In that sense I
| think Amazon would consider that serving the customer means
| securing better prices. I would not be surprised to learn
| that some element of the people responsible for getting this
| working correctly were not doing so in some way (either
| because they didn't understand, bugs in the system, or they
| were too busy doing other stuff). I would be really surprised
| if they were intentionally cheating Audible publishers out of
| relatively small sums of money though.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Hanlon's razor states ... "never attribute to malice that which
| is adequately explained by stupidity."
| krageon wrote:
| You are describing incompetence born from undirected malice.
| While it is true the malice did not lead directly to the greedy
| behaviour, it leads to an absolute lack of continuous knowledge
| (due to employees constantly leaving the company). The fact
| that this is not addressed in a way that actually works makes
| it at least indirectly purposeful. In that sense, Amazon as an
| entity is in fact being greedy and it is also not an accident.
| darkerside wrote:
| Agreed, feels like directed incompetence. If the errors were
| in the other direction, I wonder how quickly Amazon would
| direct focus to it.
| snek_case wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've heard lots of negative things about working
| at Amazon, no positive. In contrast I've known many people
| who work at Google and they seem generally happy with their
| jobs, have been there for years. The people I know who work
| in tech and are more desirable candidates would never choose
| Amazon as their first pick. I'm surprised that Amazon works
| as well as it does, as a company. There's a real cost to high
| turnover.
| plicense wrote:
| I guess on the flip side, I was receiving 100$ per month in
| AWS credits for about 2 years for an Alexa skill I had
| disabled. This was also incompetence in this case.
| swyx wrote:
| still receiving them lol. its actually a really nice
| gesture bc the credits expire and the money more than
| covers the cost but i feel more inclined to use AWS for the
| next thing i build because of credits
| ryukoposting wrote:
| 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.
| vlunkr wrote:
| That's where I assume the greed comes in. They threw software
| people at an accounting problem, and when the numbers were
| wrong in their favor, they looked the other way.
| bawolff wrote:
| As they say, "never attribute to malice that which is
| adequately explained by incompetence"
| netcan wrote:
| This is an important cliche to keep in mind, but the problem
| is that "games" play out. Incompetence can become willful or
| even strategic. Even if it doesn't start or develop as a
| mustache twirling plan, a year later someone might look at it
| and say "looks like it makes money, why fix it."
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I'll just copy my comment from another leaf of this thread:
|
| I don't like this saying because it generalises too much.
|
| For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never
| investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where
| turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful,
| malicious action.
| koide wrote:
| You're misunderstanding the quote. It doesn't mean to never
| investigate, but to never start _with the assumption_ that
| it is malice. You can complement it with the famous
| "trust, but verify" quote. Or with "giving the benefit of
| the doubt".
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Nope, the quote is quite limited in terms of conveying
| the idea. It never says anything about verification or
| trust. It basically says: "never assume malice if it's
| possible that incompetence took place".
|
| That's pretty naive way to see the world, especially in
| this day and age.
| bawolff wrote:
| > never assume malice if it's possible that incompetence
| took place".
|
| Reading the quote literally i disagree. There is miles of
| difference between "adequately explained" and "possible"
|
| > That's pretty naive way to see the world, especially in
| this day and age.
|
| I would actually argue the other way is naive. Assuming
| that all bad things that happen in the world are because
| of an evil person is what happens in movies and fairly
| tales. The real world is almost never that black and
| white.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Your sentiment is quite common among people raised in
| comfy, western parts of the world.
|
| I now live here and am astonished by the amount of adult,
| supposedly life-experienced people going into full shock
| that always comes with comments like: "I would never
| expect our government to do such thing!".
|
| It's time to grow up. I bet you think billionaires are
| good people and real justice takes place in the courts of
| law. Also, rich people face the same consequences as the
| rest of us. No?
| samatman wrote:
| Just so you understand clearly, when you lose the thread
| completely like this and start responding emotionally and
| personally, you've lost the argument and everyone
| watching knows it.
|
| You would be better served not posting this kind of
| reply.
| bawolff wrote:
| You can still fire people for incompetence. Its also just
| as important to do root cause analysis with incompetence as
| malice.
|
| In the cop example, if everyone is turning off their camera
| because the interface is terrible and if you don't do it
| just right - that problem requires a very different
| solution than if they were intentionally turning it off. If
| you assume it must be malice the fixes will be wrong and
| not accomplish anything. That doesn't imply that malice is
| impossible, just that you shouldn't assume it without
| investigation.
| lotophage wrote:
| 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.
| rsanek wrote:
| Honestly, even that hasn't been my experience. I've seen
| multiple situations where there are known, significant under-
| billings but resourcing a project to clean that up somehow
| never materializes. Intuitively it doesn't make sense.
| banku_brougham wrote:
| 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.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| I remember that deal being shared online, and being
| corrected fairly quickly.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Amazon has a worked hard to develop a reputation of being
| pro-consumer. And yes they will eat consumer facing errors.
| I have not heard the same reputation made about vendors,
| and in fact I've heard quite a few horror story rumors
| about how they treat vendors. And these complaints (vague
| as they are) seem to focus on Amazon passing the cost of
| their customer obsession to their vendors.
|
| But yes, I expect if Amazon accidentally sold me an item
| for 1% of its actual value due to a typo they will honor
| it. I expect if they send me the wrong item they'll make it
| right. As a consumer, I'm not worried about them fixing any
| errors in their favor and ignoring any errors in my favor.
|
| I just don't expect them to treat their vendors the same
| way.
| ldng wrote:
| Well, in some countries they're legally bound to anyway.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Oh, I expect them to obey laws. And I certainly don't
| automatically believe that they are screwing over vendors
| in the same way I'll automatically believe claims of them
| going out of their way for customers. I was mostly
| pointing out that how they treat customers is not
| necessarily related to how they treat vendors.
| aloer wrote:
| 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
| iqanq wrote:
| >I can totally see that happening. Who develops systems
| with short term VAT changes in mind?
|
| I suppose it's the same codebase as any other country's
| amazon, and there's a different VAT rate in every
| country.
| eru wrote:
| VAT is baked into retail prices in Germany. And retail
| prices are typically either something round or end in .99
| or so; ie not arbitrary.
|
| So it's unlikely their German prices would just take the
| same input as eg Dutch prices and changed the VAT around.
| iqanq wrote:
| I know how VAT works. If the government changes the VAT
| overnight then prices won't round to .99 until merchants
| (or Amazon themselves) change the base price again. I
| don't see the issue.
| germanier wrote:
| Usually in B2C prices are quoted and agreed upon as gross
| price (including tax). If the tax rate is lowered, this
| then raises the base price.
| aloer wrote:
| I looked this up just now and apparently Amazons case is
| more complicated due to things like sold by Amazon (16%)
| vs third party sellers (they got to choose if they pass
| it down to the customer or not). It was an economy
| stimulus after all.
|
| And apparently fixed book prices (printed on the back)
| were up to every single publisher to decide about
|
| Then you also have different VAT rules depending on the
| product category. Food is 7% in Germany.
|
| Lastly I also remember that Amazon gift cards were weird
| for a few hours. Something like you pay 48.50 and got
| 50EUR worth of credit. I can't remember if you could then
| use that credit to buy new gift cards.
|
| Lots of ways where this becomes quite a complex problem
| real fast
| lozenge wrote:
| Amazon sold all e books from Luxembourg to UK customers,
| charging them 3% VAT. When calculating royalties for
| publishers though, their contracts stipulated the 20% VAT
| rate would be used to reduce royalties. According to The
| Guardian, some received just 10% of the purchase price,
| similar to what Audible(also Amazon owned) is being
| accused of. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/o
| ct/21/amazon-fo...
|
| Uber also sold UK journeys to UK customers but put the
| fare calculation taximeter in a server in another country
| to avoid the 20% VAT. I believe they actually won that
| case as in the EU, VAT is calculated by the seller using
| their country's laws regardless of the buyer's country's
| VAT rates and laws.
| germanier wrote:
| Since 2015, VAT on eBooks is charged according to the
| buyer's country, see e.g.
| https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/electronically-
| supplie... This is also reflected on my invoices from
| Amazon.
|
| VAT law is harmonized across the EU, which country's rate
| is applicable is based on a rather complex (and ever
| changing) set of rules, but nowadays it's mostly the
| buyer's country.
| speleding wrote:
| > Aldi iirc just kept the old prices and simply gave a 3%
| discount at checkout
|
| I get your point, but they probably gave a discount of
| 1-(1.16/1.19) =~ 2.5%
| aloer wrote:
| Right. Since it was limited to a few months only I
| believe they just accepted the loss, put out some ads
| with 3% discount etc. Same with the lower VAT for food
| products.
|
| Probably also rounded down in favor for the customer but
| I can't remember the details
| duped wrote:
| Why was this not defined in a spec document and checked in a
| unit test?
|
| Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae (or
| formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was meticulously
| checked for correctness. No one should have shipped the service
| without knowing if the calculations were correct!
| rtpg wrote:
| What happens in reality is someone writes the spec as "40% of
| the unit price" or something, and that gets taken from some
| DB table at Amazon that has "unit price", but the meaning is
| different from what the spec refers to as "unit price".
|
| Meanwhile both sides of the interaction (Amazon and the
| publishers) are using words they recognize, but with
| different meanings behind them! And both sides are so used to
| seeing the words that _of course_ it's the right thing (until
| it's not!).
|
| Of course the reality is probably more subtle than this, but
| spec documents don't save you from domain knowledge (or lack
| thereof) 100% of the time. Definitely helpful as a reference
| document, of course! And it eliminates a large class of
| discussions.
| MetallicCloud wrote:
| At faang companies, there's never a spec document.
| xyzzyz wrote:
| In FAANG, if people had to write accurate spec in addition
| to all of the other steps of the process to launch
| something at a big corp, nothing would _ever_ get done.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| One problem with high turnover is that the people who have
| developed an understanding for how the systems should work,
| and which documents are definitive, are long gone and if
| you're lucky you know the people who knew them.
|
| A big part of the problem with the situation I'm discussing
| here is that the people who were using the tool were using it
| incorrectly. The people using the tool (which made offers
| available to specific customers in certain conditions) did
| not understand the nuances of the different price values on
| offers and how they connected with royalties.
|
| I forget the specifics, but imagine someone working with
| publishers to setup special offers and entering prices into
| our tool and they just populate two of the three different
| "Price" fields with the same price because they don't know
| the difference between "list price" and "my price" and they
| put the right value in "discount price" (or whatever the
| terms were). Totally unknown to the person entering the
| offer, royalties are (incorrectly) calculated based on one of
| those columns that they have now put a technically incorrect
| value into. Even if there was a perfectly clear spec, and
| there wasn't, and it had been implemented perfectly, the tool
| still would've failed because the people using it didn't
| really understand the system either.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| > 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 of the
| consequences of their decisions.
|
| In fact most companies don't do a "spec document" at all they
| design their system in small iterations called "sprints"
| typically 2-weeks and the "spec" is a ticket in a system like
| Jira (others are available). This process is part of Agile
| Project Management methods
|
| > Everywhere I've worked where there were defined formulae
| (or formulae to be defined) this kind of thing was
| meticulously checked for correctness
|
| There are some industries where they still do that kind of
| thing (BDUF) for example government work, defence, oil and
| gas. These are older industries that just haven't changed the
| way they approach projects. Amazon here is a bit a front
| runner when it comes to updating it's practices to be more
| leading edge so they likely adopted an Agile approach here
| learning about what was required as they go through the
| project.
| germanier wrote:
| 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.
| Dave3of5 wrote:
| 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.
| germanier wrote:
| I know it's not the "Agile way" and it often isn't done
| but I am advocating for leaving the details of core
| business decisions (e.g. how royalties are calculated) to
| the people who's competence lies in this question: the
| business development and legal teams - and not the
| software development team to whatever is easiest to
| implement for them. The latter might not always be what's
| best for the business. If you are not doing that, you
| need many iterations to rediscover what's already known
| to the organization.
|
| > "Working software over comprehensive documentation"
|
| Working includes _correctly working_. As soon as you
| interface with the legal world this means to actually
| calculate whatever your business agreed to and not
| something else just because it 's easier, produces some
| random numbers, and exists without printing to stderr.
| That's not working software.
|
| This typically can't be worked out by development teams
| themselves, for the reasons you mentioned. And that's
| exactly why some kind of spec (in whatever form necessary
| - probably not a document of hundreds of pages but also
| not a one sentence user story) is needed to capture that.
| That's what I mean by _translating_ and I 'm not
| proposing to leave that to some product manager.
|
| Of course this can also be fixed by adapting your
| contracts (which can be an enormous task) but for that
| you also need some documentation on whatever the system
| is doing (just as developers can't read contracts,
| lawyers can't read code) and will discover that many
| stakeholders won't agree to that and demand changes.
|
| This is all not to be confused with doing a big design of
| the technical architecture and all features beforehand.
| duped wrote:
| I'm not talking about any specific PM strategies though.
| For the software to be written, it must be specified.
| Whether that's in a ticket or design doc is irrelevant.
|
| As you point out, the agile manifesto eschews documentation
| for working software. This is not about having
| documentation, it's about defining "working" for the
| software. The ticket could not be written or handled
| without consultation with legal or BA teams on how the
| formulae are defined, similarly to how if you're
| implementing any kind of system where the formulae are
| critically important for correctness you need to consult
| back and forth with the expert stakeholders to double
| check.
|
| I don't know any other way to do this that isn't negligent,
| not just by the developer, but by the reviewer, the stake
| holders, and ultimately the PM that signs off on accepting
| the task as "done" when it hasn't been checked for
| correctness.
| SamBam wrote:
| I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a buyer
| downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much) before
| calculating royalties could possibly be anything other than
| shady accounting. That's not just a couple engineers confused
| about the specs.
|
| > 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
|
| I really don't see how this is a valid excuse. "How the
| royalties should be calculated" is a lawyer's domain, an
| engineer should never have had anything to do with the
| decision, and any engineer who was tasked with coding the
| calculation without proper guidance should have pushed back.
| Arrath wrote:
| >I don't see how charging ebook authors 15c per megabyte a
| buyer downloads (it can't cost AZ anywhere near that much)
| before calculating royalties could possibly be anything other
| than shady accounting.
|
| Sounds like easy profit from a captive audience.
| [deleted]
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Too bad these kind of ,,mistakes" never happen in favor of the
| customer... always in favor of Amazon.
| drdrey wrote:
| Not what OP is saying here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30369741
| davidgerard wrote:
| Treating the staff responsible with the sort of contemptuous
| malice you describe does not somehow absolve the company of
| culpability. Amazon set up these conditions and is happy for
| them to continue.
| advael wrote:
| 1. I doubt errors of this magnitude are tolerated for long when
| the financial beneficiary of the error is not Amazon, and if
| I'm correct in this, a systematic selection pressure of this
| kind is indistinguishable from greed in this context
|
| 2. I am no less uncomfortable with monopolistic publishers who
| exploit creators out of incompetence after becoming the only
| game in town and making any ability to walk away from
| negotiations with them a Hobson's choice at best than I am with
| ones where all of that is true except the harm is due to
| greed/malice instead
|
| 3. Corporations aren't people and even if you believe (as I
| don't) that they can meaningfully _have_ intentions in the same
| sense that people do, those intentions do not matter in a
| context where the behavior is on the scale of an organization,
| and so separating incompetence from malice is a distraction in
| the first place
| mabbo wrote:
| But this goes to the heart of problem at Amazon: "Customer
| Obsession". Which really means "we only care about people
| paying us money".
|
| If Amazon cared about creators, they would have built an
| automated system that monitors royalties and ensures that no
| matter what changes occur, creators are being paid fairly,
| correctly. They'd have a small product manager team who _are_
| experts in royalties because it 's their job to be.
|
| But that doesn't benefit a _customer_ , so none of that exists.
| Because only people paying Amazon money are worthy of such
| attention.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Setting up teams to fail to calculate royalties correctly could
| be deliberate. I'm not saying you intentionally set out to
| defraud anyone, but supplying technically correct information
| that could be misinterpreted may have been a way for Amazon
| management to engineer the errors they want.
| Abodono wrote:
| > 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 proper time and effort to make sure
| all the systems work, have been thoroughly tested, have lots of
| test coverage, that the teams manages to keep subject matter
| expert around, etc.
|
| Amazon doesn't because it's too expansive to have dev resources
| doing all that, so most projects get released using the bare
| minimum, and get maintained using the bare minimum.
| a2800276 wrote:
| 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
| are any different, apart from the potential consequences
| being non fatal, obviously.
| jboy55 wrote:
| Its not just company greed, you can't get any engineers to
| agree to maintain a service in Keep the Lights on mode. Its
| not in their interest, let me explain.
|
| First, there's 0 chance at promotion doing maintenance
| work, so L4 (jr) engineers will bounce after a year or so
| as they have a clock running and have to move up or out. L5
| engineers will stagnate and they will at risk for URA as
| they are supposed to keep improving. Frankly the work isn't
| L6 worthy, an L6 maintaining this as the only thing they
| are doing won't last a quarter.
|
| So these services that just 'do the job' get bounced around
| from team to team and perhaps when they get old and creaky
| enough, an L4 can promo themselves doing an
| upgrade/refactor. Until then, they just exist and are a
| bane to some team where they only produce off hour pages,
| even if a whole publisher segment depends on them to get
| paid.
| dogleash wrote:
| >you can't get any engineers to agree to maintain a
| service in Keep the Lights on mode
|
| ...and then you go on to explain in business terms that
| only apply to the handful of companies that have cargo-
| culted similar dev team designs and incentives.
|
| I started writing a comment here about how my current
| employer structures and incentivizes maintenance but I've
| deleted it and decided not to give it away that info for
| free.
| jboy55 wrote:
| I don't think the culture I designed is a 'cargo-cult',
| but more of the result of a first order solution to
| designing engineer incentives. "We want to encourage
| engineers to get better over time, be entrepreneurial and
| feel in charge of their promotion" leads directly to
| "Maintenance work does not allow me to succeed".
| Aeolun wrote:
| > apart from the potential consequences being non fatal
|
| Kind of a major factor though.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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."
| a2800276 wrote:
| "Let's cheat the publishers out of their royalty!"
|
| is greed and:
|
| "Let's save money creating the services we provide,
| almost certainly at the cost of our customers in order to
| be more profitable"
|
| is not?
|
| "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"
|
| in that case I'd argue it's a massive management failure
| on Amazon to have a bunch of people working for them that
| do not care about the consequences of their actions. To
| labor my previous metaphor: somehow the radiation machine
| manufacturer finds a way to get its employees to care
| that their products work as intended.
|
| And while I agree it would be morally worse if they were
| intentionally bilking customers (be it content producers
| or listeners), sins-of-omission are very real as well.
| You're right that $10mio are nothing to Amazon, but $10k
| could easily be the difference between wild success of an
| independent audio book creator and their financial ruin.
| tjbiddle wrote:
| "Never assume malice for that which can be better explained by
| incompetence"
| mejutoco wrote:
| "Never say never"
| UweSchmidt wrote:
| It's the other way 'round. We're all good at tacitly
| accepting broken processes if it benefits us but will quickly
| fix things if opportune.
| patrec wrote:
| Exactly. Just like "Correlation does not imply causation"
| Hanlon's razor is one of those things people love to trot
| out to appear sophisticated when it has quite the opposite
| effect.
|
| Would it also be "We eventually figured out something was
| wrong and went through a very annoying process of learning
| about royalties and how they interplay with prices,
| discounts, and other factors and then set things right" if
| Amazon's mistake was cutting their own fair share in half
| rather than their business partner's?
| bitcharmer wrote:
| I don't like this saying because it generalises too much.
|
| For example, if you follow this line of thought you'd never
| investigate murderous cops simply because their cameras where
| turned off due to their incompetence rather than purposeful,
| malicious action.
| alexcosan wrote:
| I see this more as "do not assume until there's evidence of
| malice". Not that you should not look for evidence -
| basically, innocent until proven guilty. There's a tendency
| to judge every ignorant act as malice when, a lot of times,
| it's just that - ignorance/incompetence.
|
| Not talking specifically about this case, although it may
| apply, we just read a twitter thread.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| "Attempting to invalidate random quotes you read on the
| internet by taking them to logical extremes is kind of
| missing the point."
|
| - Albert Einstein
| throwanem wrote:
| The first two words of the rule are "never _assume_ ".
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Reductio ad absurdum.
|
| If you were really honest about the meaning of the quote
| you should say "never assume malice" because that's the
| actual statement here.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| Not at all. If you have two equally likely possibilities
| - malice and incompetence - you should assume
| incompetence.
|
| I have another saying though: "Sufficiently advanced
| incompetence is indistinguishable from malice".
| wccrawford wrote:
| It's not "never investigate". It's "never assume".
| ekianjo wrote:
| only valid at the individual level.
| harry8 wrote:
| 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 wrong somehow. It's just not an
| accident in any meaningful interpretation of that word. It's a
| level of incompetence that we don't accept as any kind of
| defense.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| 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).
| harry8 wrote:
| 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.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| 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...
| harry8 wrote:
| 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.
| harry8 wrote:
| 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.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| I once was issued a ticket for "reckless driving". That
| night I was taking a curve in the rain and the car spun
| out, hit the curb, popped a tire, and (I would later
| learn) had damage to the axle. The cops weren't on the
| scene when it happened, didn't find any evidence of
| intoxication or other wrong doing, but felt as though
| their job wasn't done until some form of "justice" was
| served so decided to ticket me even though had I come to
| them for help. Great job guys. "protect and serve".
|
| Fun story. So I'm sitting in court with the other people
| who are going to fight their ticket. I overhear a woman
| talking about her case. Remarkably similar to mine.
| Night, raining, car spun out, reckless driving ticket.
| Might even have been the exact same location.
|
| If I had known this earlier, I could have compiled a
| record of all the other people who crashed in the same
| area under the same circumstances. I in fact absolutely
| would have used the argument with the judge "look at all
| the times I didn't crash", along with "look at all the
| times these other people didn't crash", building to a
| crescendo of "what are the odds all these people with
| otherwise clean driving records crashed in this same spot
| under these same conditions."
|
| Luckily I didn't need to compile the traffic court
| history of that particular off ramp. I won the case
| anyway. Got about a third of the way through my stack of
| papers that I retrieved via FOIL request and online
| search before the judge interjected. "J: Counselor, are
| we beating a dead horse here? DA: I think so your honor.
| J: Mr. IIAOPSW you don't have to prove anything. I'm
| convinced the prosecution has failed to show sufficient
| evidence for their case. You're free to go. Me: Thank you
| kindly your honor."
|
| Don't tell me what would or wouldn't work as a defense
| before a judge son. I've kicked the DA's ass before and I
| can do it again.
|
| Your arguments are hyperbolic and you've engaged in a
| bait and switch. Hyperbolic, because Amazon
| miscalculating a few cents on a royalty payment isn't
| nearly on the level of wrongdoing as negligent vehicular
| manslaughter. Bait and switch because you started from
| the premise that "the fact that the error always works in
| Amazon's favor is proof of intentional wrongdoing". But
| when it was pointed out that you don't actually have
| evidence that the error always works in Amazon's favor,
| you switched to "no excuse for this. None. Ever."
| However, if we agreed to the standard that there's "no
| excuse for this ever", what's your excuse for all the
| people who stole from Amazon by accepting over payment
| for royalties? Why didn't they look at their payment
| slips, notice they were overpaid, and kindly notify
| customer service so they could return the money?
| Remember, in your own testimony you said "there is ZERO
| excuse for this. You can't accidentally rob people and
| claim incompetence while pointing to the other times you
| were incompetent and yet didn't rob people."
|
| Your argument would be ripped to shreds by any competent
| lawyer.
| impostervt wrote:
| As a publisher that uses ACX/Audible, it's REALLY hard to figure
| out how much they should be paying you. When I look at my Sales
| Dashboard, there's no monetary figure. It's also set to Lifetime
| Earnings, instead of the current month, which is just weird.
|
| Sales are broken down into AL Units, ALOP units, ALC units, Net
| returns, and Net Sales units. Again, these show the # of units,
| but not the rate you're being paid for them.
|
| You do receive a Royalty report for each month, but it comes 2
| months after the close of that month (my December one is the
| latest available). It does have dollar values, but it's hard to
| figure out how they arrived at their numbers. It's generally
| related to how long the book is (longer = more money), and
| whether the books were bought on some kind of sale (no
| visibility).
|
| You kind of just have to trust ACX.
| thrower123 wrote:
| I've always thought it was a bit odd how it is usually cheaper to
| buy a Kindle copy of a book and add the Audible narration on,
| than to buy the Audible audiobook outright.
| MrDunham wrote:
| I'm convinced that the prices of audible books for people
| without a membership were solely to drive people to memberships
| (Much like how Vail ski resorts has admitted they increased
| ticket prices by over 200% so that they can say a season pass
| will be paid for with only four days of skiing)
| nicolimo86 wrote:
| I use Storytel instead since 2 years. The catalogue it's quite
| reach for what concerns my tastes.
| zodo123 wrote:
| The giant nosed character shown in the twitter preview for the
| audiblegate.com site brings to mind some uncomfortable and
| hopefully unintentional stereotypes.
| [deleted]
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Same here. I found myself hoping it was supposed to be Bezos?
| sol_invictus wrote:
| It has large ears too. Which stereotype are you referring to
| that has large ears and noses? Brits perhaps?
| krageon wrote:
| When stereotypes make people uncomfortable, it's almost
| always a class of people viewed as commonly persecuted and
| usually a heavily US-influenced culture pointing it out. As
| the poster does not mention skin colour, we can assume it is
| white (given the US-centric context). As such, it has to be a
| Jewish stereotype. I am basing this on the fact that the
| discrimination that makes US citizens uncomfortable is
| generally against jews or black people. There is a certain
| segment that thinks discrimination against white people is an
| issue, but there are no dogwhistles to indicate that (and I'd
| assume skin colour would be emphasised more).
| judge2020 wrote:
| Hmm, it seems twitter:image and og:image are now
| https://static.wixstatic.com/media/a4d16d_faa91d4b4ee54bb5ba...
| , but Twitter aggressively caches (saves?) that preview image.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Looked to me a bit like Steve Jobs.
| samatman wrote:
| I actually came here to say this. I'm quite sure it's
| unintentional, and was just someone grabbing some clip art
| which was itself perhaps not fully thought through.
|
| I'm not going to be leading the mob that makes a big deal out
| of this, because I don't care. But combining a huge nose and a
| bag of money in your splash image is not going to serve your
| cause in any useful way.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'm honestly curious about this statement, maybe someone can
| explain - the author seems to be upset about this part:
|
| "where the consumer could return their AB whenever they pleased,
| and the PRODUCER shouldered the cost."
|
| ....as opposed to who? When you return an item to amazon within
| their returns policy, who do you think pays you back for that? Is
| the author assuming that when their book gets "returned" for any
| reason.....it's amazon who should pay the consumer back, not the
| author? Why?
| capybaradive wrote:
| i believe the issue is that audible is marketed as allowing
| returns at _any_ time in the future, which is a pretty
| extraordinary return policy that leads to more subscribers. but
| then the producer has to shoulder the costs of this incredibly
| lenient return policy.
| contravariant wrote:
| Well, taking it to absurd levels it would be something like if
| Spotify were to claim they are 'selling' songs to people who
| are currently listening to them and they are 'returned' when
| people stop, with Spotify just paying royalties over the
| difference.
|
| The situation with audiobooks is far less extreme, but there is
| a cost attached to lenient return policies. Though you'd expect
| Amazon to be losing more money on it than the authors, so it's
| more like the authors disagree with Amazon's business model.
| gambiting wrote:
| I'd love to know the stats for how many people listen to the
| entire book(or 90% of it) and then return it. I have refunded
| books on audible before, but it was always because I didn't
| like the narrator, I listen to books while driving and
| sometimes the narration works in the car, sometimes it really
| doesn't - that's when I refund and get something else, but
| it's always within the first hour of listening.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Furthermore, Audible only lets you return 2-3 books self-
| serve before you have to go through customer service. This
| small friction is a real impediment to abuse of the system,
| and I highly doubt Audible won't refuse returns if you
| return one every month.
|
| I think I've returned 4-5 books total, out of 62 over the
| last 6 years[1]. All were because either I really didn't
| like the book, or the narration volume wasn't very well
| balanced (road noise means turning the volume up to hear
| the quiet parts, then getting your eardrums blasted out on
| the loud parts).
|
| [1] It's hard to believe that I've spent 35+ entire days
| listening to audiobooks. That's nuts.
| pas wrote:
| Um. Amazon is a marketplace, it gets a cut. Since the sale is
| void, the seller gets 0, Amazon gets some percent of that,
| which is ... 0.
|
| what the hell. how else could it be? if Amazon is billing
| sellers for "transaction" costs (or presence on platform cost),
| that's one thing, but that should be a fixed dollar amount.
|
| even using the term "cost" makes no sense, because it's not a
| cost, it's "would have been revenue", and yes, there's a cost
| of doing business, handling returns, etc. but all of those are
| automated on this shiny marketplace, right, right? right!?
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| qzx_pierri wrote:
| 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 headline and link their Tweet
| in the ensuing article.
|
| Amazon has done some really shady stuff in their lifetime,
| but cmon.
| subw00f wrote:
| >because it gives publishers incentive to put out quality
| products
|
| I wouldn't say quality products, lowest common
| denominator and all.
| prepend wrote:
| It's possible that author is bad at basic arithmetic and
| doesn't understand that 40% of $0 is $0.
|
| It's interesting to me how many people lack basic financial
| critical thinking skills and even something super basic
| like profit isn't intuitive to all (but it should). So if I
| see a $5 income one month and a $-1 income next month
| because the two people returned their book, I get angry
| instead of trying to understand why.
|
| In the old paper publishing world it took a long time for
| this accounting so it wasn't as easy to see the returns. I
| remember a friend who worked at a bookstore and they would
| tear the cover off books and send the cover back as a
| return. The return would be credited against the store
| account and not count towards author royalties.
| conor_f wrote:
| 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.
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| 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.
| toqy wrote:
| I'm a fan of the subscription model just because I can get
| books that are normally a lot more expensive than a credit
| with a single credit. And if there's any cheaper books I can
| just buy them for cash.
| mahogany wrote:
| For those in the US that are reading: you can generally check
| out audiobooks for free at your local library.
|
| Unfortunately I don't know how libraries work in the UK.
| conor_f wrote:
| 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!
| cassiogo wrote:
| Do you have any audible alternatives to suggest?
| conor_f wrote:
| I don't personally listen to audio books, so hopefully
| someone can chime in with some helpful alternatives?
|
| From a quick search though, it looks like https://libro.fm/
| is where I would start looking with an Audible alternative as
| it seems to align with my ideals and has a decent selection.
| There does seem to be a good few options though so have a
| look yourself if nobody has further suggestions :)
| rjtavares wrote:
| Apparently doesn't work outside the US/Canada:
|
| > You appear to be accessing the site from outside the
| United States or Canada. While a credit card from the
| USA/Canada is required to purchase a monthly membership, it
| is possible to buy a gift membership from anywhere in the
| world.
|
| It's incredible how far behind the Audiobook world is from
| Podcasting.
|
| The only company trying something different is Pushkin. I
| think that may be the start of a Audiobook revolution.
| Symmetry wrote:
| Reading this I did a brief search and Kobo looks sort of
| interesting in offering combined book/audiobooks. A
| subscription for 1 book a month at $9.99 with no option to
| buy more credits means I'll be spending a bit more but the
| extra convenience might be worth it.
|
| https://www.kobo.com/us/en/audiobooks
|
| EDIT: Audible's media integration and volume levels have been
| sort of broken on Android for a year now so I've been vaguely
| meaning to switch and this is just a prompt.
| toqy wrote:
| I don't have an answer for a general audible competitor
| because I too use audible. However I do purchase directly
| from one studio that I'm a fan of, Soundbooth Theater. There
| may be other groups with a similar set up, but I'm not aware
| of any (nor have I looked though)
| citiguy wrote:
| This behavior isn't limited to Amazon. In my years of working for
| IT on Wall Street, I've seen this happen numerous times.
| Sometimes it's too hard to write the code to ensure the contract
| is complied with. Other times, the folks who wrote the contract
| didn't communicate it clearly and/or document it. It's not even
| limited to American companies. When I worked at a large Swiss
| bank, they had a similar compliance issue.
| donutshop wrote:
| Shout out to gumroad. Wished all platforms put creators first.
| werber wrote:
| What is the best option for someone who mostly listens to books
| read by the author and has relatively low brow taste? Recently
| two of my favorite musical acts, sleater Kinney and Liz phair
| released audible exclusives that I loved. I hate the idea of
| artists being screwed over, but, I'm at a loss for where to turn.
| Audible is a huge part of my life, but I don't want to support
| artists being screwed over.
| lolinder wrote:
| You're fine to keep using Audible, in that case. This Twitter
| thread is overblown. Read through the top few comments here and
| you'll see that what is happening is exactly what the artists
| sign up for: they get a portion of the net sales of _credits_ ,
| weighted by length/price of the book.
|
| Audible's business model is selling subscriptions. Artists get
| a share of that revenue, and their share is comparable to that
| from any other publisher. The Twitter user is trying to exploit
| internet outrage for their own gain, not reacting against a
| truly bad deal.
| altairprime wrote:
| Would it be comparable to Spotify Premium crossed with a
| Jukebox service of some sort in that regard, or is the
| credits model unusually unique to Audible here?
| j_d_b wrote:
| Librivox is a community-supported free audio book service
| featuring the world's literature read by volunteers. They also
| have most new titles available. It is the perfect alternative to
| Audible.
| actionReaction wrote:
| The whole point he makes is, "Amazon is bad because everyone else
| says Amazon is bad, and I just piggyback the public opinion with
| my little opinion about seemingly unfair royalties Amazon takes."
| It might be I'm wrong, but the numbers this guy put up do sound
| like just whining. It takes a lot of effort to provide cloud-
| based services such as Audible.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I find Audible really easy and convenient, but it's frustrating
| to hear that authors get shafted. Some independent authors I
| follow have been banned from Amazon's platforms and they were
| forced to create their own platforms and self-host. The downside
| is that the audiobooks are more expensive. The upside is that
| they're DRM-free and the creators receive a much higher
| percentage of sales, so they can get by with fewer sales.
| mleonhard wrote:
| https://www.Downpour.com is a good alternative to Audible.
| Downpour lets you download MP3 files of most books! The app
| works well on iOS.
| vasachi wrote:
| You'd think a simple report of all sales of a book within a
| period would solve all the issues. A simple table of:
|
| Timestamp, book, price
|
| Then author could simply calculate and verify royalties.
| puffoflogic wrote:
| That would not solve the issue of Audible offering free or
| heavily discounted products and then paying a "royalty" based
| on the discounted price.
| langsoul-com wrote:
| His call to action sucked. Should've listed good alternatives. At
| the end of the day, people will get their audio books, creators
| be damned.
| artemonster wrote:
| Sometimes there are none. Sometimes you have to pay more for
| less convenient service if you have your principles. And people
| really do that, you cant always have your cake and eat it too.
| sytelus wrote:
| Why there aren't viable competitors for Audible? Shouldn't this
| be much easier than selling physical books?
| michael_michael wrote:
| I feel like the Twitter thread--for all its focus on royalty math
| --is missing some crucial context for people not immersed in the
| sausage-making of audiobooks, specifically Audible's ACX
| platform. I worked for Audible some years ago, so understand this
| context a bit better than most, and can explain for those who are
| interested. I left Audible not too long after ACX launched, but
| remember many meetings about it. To be fair, though, I was not
| directly involved in the creation of ACX and my recollection of
| its details are fuzzy.
|
| The thread author's complaint about Audible relates specifically
| to ACX. Again, even if you are an avid AB listener, you are
| probably not aware of the existence of ACX because its function
| is extremely boring. It's Audible's "audiobook rights
| marketplace". It is designed especially for people that hold the
| rights to books that would otherwise not be produced in audio.
| Those people can use the ACX platform to connect with narrators
| and producers who will help them record an audiobook version of
| their text, which will eventually be distributed on Audible--and
| therefore Amazon and (the holy grail) iTunes.
|
| If you're Stephen King, then Simon & Schuster is your publisher
| in hardcover, paperback, ebook, audio, whatever. There is no
| doubt in anyone's mind that Stephen King's next novel will be
| made into an audiobook, and it will release the same day in every
| format imaginable. The Stephen Kings of the [audio]book world
| will have never have anything to do with ACX. No need.
|
| On the other hand, if you're a low-to-mid-tier author published
| by a smaller house that doesn't have audiobook production
| capabilities, things get dicier. Before Audible, many, many, many
| books were never made into audiobooks. Audiobook production is
| time-consuming and expensive, and audiobooks were a niche format.
| Audiobook rights, therefore were often sold to audiobook-only
| publishing houses that don't hold quite the same prestige as
| names like Random House or Penguin. You've probably never heard
| of these publishing houses, except maybe at the beginning of an
| audiobook: "Blackstone Audio presents...", "Brilliance Audio
| presents...", "Recorded Books Presents", etc. Those audiobook-
| only publishing houses could pick up the rights to reasonably
| well-known books and authors that their print publisher had no
| intention of producing in audio.
|
| Now that audiobooks have become much, much more mainstream--in no
| small part thanks to Audible's efforts--there are fewer scraps
| from the major publishers to fight over. Today there is a much
| greater likelihood that a print book will be published in
| unabridged audio than there was twenty years ago. But there are
| still many "lost" books that didn't get picked up by the major
| audiobook publishing houses. Or the mid-tier ones, or even the
| bottom feeders. That's where ACX comes in.
|
| If you must use ACX to publish your audiobook, it's been
| overlooked (perhaps unfairly) by just about everyone else who
| could stand to make a buck off of purchasing the audio rights and
| producing it. Perhaps there is a more charitable way to put it,
| but that's the gist.
|
| Using ACX is definitely a gamble. It's a gamble for everyone
| except Audible. The gamble is this: you will spend thousands of
| dollars producing an audiobook. In exchange you will get
| distribution on the biggest audiobook marketplaces in the world:
| Audible, Amazon, iTunes. As I recall, there were ways to split
| this risk. If a narrator/producer believed that the audiobook
| would be a best-seller, they could negotiate a lower upfront fee
| in exchange for a cut of back-end sales, for example.
|
| The specific terms of the ACX deal you sign on for are certainly
| in Audible's favor. The only way to get better terms is to have
| your audiobook rights picked up by a major publishing house that
| has a deal in place with Audible already. Then you are largely
| shielded from all of these details by your
| publisher/manager/lawyer. If you're on ACX, it's likely because
| you have no other choice. Audible's fee here is largely just a
| way to gatekeep access to their huge distribution platforms: the
| Audible service itself, Amazon, and iTunes.
|
| I can't speak to the specifics of the author's complaints about
| how royalties are calculated. But knowing the people that worked,
| and still work at Audible, my gut feeling is that there is no
| malicious intent here. At worst, there is an imbalance of
| emotional investment between the authors and Audible. These
| authors have, after all, likely spent years of their life working
| on a book and shepherding it through the publishing world
| themselves without the aid of a publishing house. Audible, on the
| other hand, is largely devoted to the content they publish, the
| Audible platform itself, and their goal of converting people into
| subscribers.
| Tepix wrote:
| > _It 's a gamble for everyone except Audible. The gamble is
| this: you will spend thousands of dollars producing an
| audiobook. In exchange you will get distribution on the biggest
| audiobook marketplaces in the world: Audible, Amazon, iTunes._
|
| Audible and Amazon are the same thing.
|
| iTunes: Can't everyone get his/her audiobook on iTunes?
|
| I don't think producing content and then getting 13% of the
| proceeds is appealing. Neither are 25% or even 40%.
|
| But then again i stay awayfrom Audible because of the DRM.
| michael_michael wrote:
| > Audible and Amazon are the same thing.
|
| I'm acutely aware of this having worked there. They're the
| same thing to you, but not to most authors. Seeing their
| [audio]book come up in an Amazon search is distinctly
| different, even if it all leads you to the same place.
|
| > iTunes: Can't everyone get his/her audiobook on iTunes?
|
| No. At least not when I worked there. Audible was the only
| way to get into the audiobooks section of iTunes. That may
| have changed.
| strgcmc wrote:
| I think your comment will likely be underappreciated, but this
| is really the most comprehensive take on understanding the
| ecosystem.
|
| Conversely, the default state of things where ACX is
| effectively targeting the "leftovers" that nobody else thought
| was profitable enough, also represents an opportunity for
| product marketing. To those authors who have no other choice
| but ACX, ideally you'd want them to feel like this is a
| positive for them, a saving grace, a friend helping you out
| when nobody else would... rather than like say, a loan shark
| offering usurious terms and a threat to break your kneecaps
| after you've tried other banks and couldn't get a business
| loan. Picking an interpretation is really just about a point of
| view, so the PR/marketing folks better get out there and start
| spinning the other way (which to be fair, I think there IS a
| legitimate friendly take here, and IMO I don't think Audible is
| really the loan shark in this analogy).
|
| For now, the net result is not dissimilar from Uber and its
| drivers. Uber PR will harp on flexibility and extra side income
| opportunities that wouldn't be possible without Uber, while
| detractors will harp on the low earnings potential factoring in
| vehicle maintenance or the ever present contractor vs employee
| debate. No matter which side you believe more, the net result
| is that drivers don't have much leverage and aren't getting a
| particularly generous deal by any means... So it goes for
| authors and narrators on ACX too, I think.
| scrooched_moose wrote:
| Regardless of whether the underpaying allegations are true,
| Amazon keeping 60-75% of the sales price is absolutely egregious.
| People were absolutely up in arms about Apple's 30% app store cut
| a year ago.
| reddog wrote:
| He lost me at the start by complaining about Audibles listener
| friendly return policy. How is the producer "shouldering the
| cost" when I return their crappy, overwritten, poorly narrated
| audible book for credit?
| mrleinad wrote:
| Not sure what the limits are for returning content, but I'd set
| some if they haven't already. You shouldn't be able to return
| the content if you listened on its entirety, for example.
| reddog wrote:
| I agree that its dishonest and despicable to return a book
| that you've completed and enjoyed (or even found mediocre).
| In fact I wish there was a Audible tip jar that let me give
| extra money to writers who have changed my life with a great
| book.
|
| But if you've read enough you've probably had the experience
| of finishing the last page of a book and hurling it across
| the room in anger and frustration. It could be that that
| writer has pulled you though the story by making narative
| promises that painted him into a corner resulting in a
| maddening it-was-all-a-dream type conclusion. Or maybe you
| get to the last few pages of a book and start to realize that
| the story is not going to conclude and this book is in fact
| the first book in a planned 12 volume epic that the 75 year
| old author is going to finish over the next 30 years.
|
| In those cases I think the reader is out more than just a
| credit. Where do we go to get back the 20 never-to-be-relived
| hours of our lives that we just poured into this deadend
| crap?
|
| And for the record, I have a couple of hundred Audible books
| in my library and only returned one that I completely
| finished. It resulted in a letter from Amazon fussing at me
| for doing so and telling me not to make it a habit.
| mrleinad wrote:
| Not everything needs to be reimbursed, sometimes you'll
| choose something that won't work for you, and that's ok.
| That doesn't mean the author was dishonest at all, even if
| he was not the best writer.
|
| I think that's what reviews are for. If you had a good
| time, write a good review. Same if you had a bad time,
| write a bad one and warn others. And check other people's
| reviews to see if something's worth it or not.
|
| I'm saying that being myself a consumer and not a producer.
| I would benefit from being able to return books after
| reading them, but I don't think it's ethical to do so. I
| might try to sell it again in case of physical books, of
| course.
| MrDunham wrote:
| There's a bit of a fine line here. I used a credit on an
| audible book that was just rehashed, mediocre content and
| empty promises. The gulf between the marketing promise and
| content was very, very wide.
|
| That was one I read in its entirety thinking that something
| insightful or useful would come of it and by the end it was
| clear that the author just read a handful of blog posts on
| marketing and slapped together a book to call himself an
| author.
|
| I returned it for a credit.
|
| Now, I should mention that I have over 120 audible books in
| my library and I've only returned two since joining audible 7
| or 8 years ago.
|
| But should I have gotten a refund for that book?
|
| On one hand it was a never ending stream of empty promises
| that were all left unfulfilled. On the other hand, I read the
| book in its entirety.
|
| Perhaps audible does/should have a mechanism to keep an eye
| out for abuse. I'd call myself a pretty darn good customer
| that has read plenty of mediocre books that weren't returned.
| Someone constantly downloading and refunding books to game
| the system, OTOH, should probably lose the refund privilege.
| mrleinad wrote:
| What was the overall consensus for that book in the
| reviews? Or were you amongst the first ones to buy it?
| philwebster wrote:
| Not surprised they're mistreating the creators based on the way
| they treat customers. The way they delete any unused credits upon
| canceling a subscription is egregious.
|
| https://help.audible.com/s/article/do-i-keep-my-credits-if-i...
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I was recently looking at the financials of a FBA business (a
| business that sells on Amazon and stores their inventory with
| Amazon)
|
| The fees that Amazon took was DOUBLE what it cost the seller to
| actually buy the product and have it shipped from China
|
| Once you factor in advertising costs, Amazon is taking something
| like 75% of the cost of the product
| WoahNoun wrote:
| Shipping a product directly from China when ordered versus a
| "Prime" label with a 0-2 day shipping isn't the same thing.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| The products are shipped from China to Amazon's warehouses...
| WoahNoun wrote:
| And then Amazon charges the fees that it costs to get it
| from the warehouse to the customer within 0-2 days. If the
| seller thinks they have a cheaper way to get it from the
| Los Angeles port to rural West Virginia they are free to
| not use the service.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| Why are you defending Amazon's fees here so much? The
| costs they charge relate more to their monopoly on where
| people shop than their actual costs involved
|
| It's just scary to think how much product quality suffers
| when these companies charge so much in fees. It's a race
| to the bottom to make any profit at all and they don't
| have much left to actually consider quality
| WoahNoun wrote:
| >The costs they charge relate more to their monopoly on
| where people shop than their actual costs involved.
|
| [Citation needed]
|
| Offering <2-day shipping across every address in the US
| is very expensive. Amazon sellers can sell on Amazon
| without using FBA.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| The fees are broken out into line items. Shipping and
| inventory costs is a relatively small part. General
| marketplace fees are much higher. Have you ever sold on
| Amazon or done any research on this?
| WoahNoun wrote:
| The general marketplace fees are the same whether you use
| FBA or not. Your original comment was complaining about
| FBA fees which are separate from the marketplace fees.
| weird-eye-issue wrote:
| I'm not sure how you interpreted it that way. I was
| talking about Amazon's fees in general
|
| I'm not sure why you are so stuck on shipping costs. I
| was clearly talking about all the fees.
| conradev wrote:
| From the linked post:
|
| "If you've ever looked at the Audible ACX contract, you've seen
| the complicated sales earnings math (another future post). For
| now, let's focus only on the result: the amount of money which
| ends up in our bank"
|
| I personally feel like I need to see the math in order to
| understand what is actually going on
| csours wrote:
| Sounds like the marketing is misrepresenting the contract -
| which consumers have some protections against, but I'm not sure
| how many similar protections exist for what are supposed to be
| sophisticated counter-parties.
| falcolas wrote:
| ACX producer here. You get as much say in the contract as you
| do the average EULA. If you want to use Audible without a
| publisher to negotiate on your behalf, you get a 40% royalty
| rate, but not always (hence the complicated math comments).
|
| Some purchases are worth nothing (literally invoiced at a 0%
| royalty rate) to the authors/producers.
| vasachi wrote:
| Why are they 0%?
| krageon wrote:
| Because it is good for Amazon
| falcolas wrote:
| Looks like it's promo codes. Which authors can generate
| and sell/give away outside of audible. Technically, so
| can producers too.
|
| So, still sketchy, but for different reasons.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| No, no more appending "-gate" to everything for clickbait.
|
| The scandals that occupy the attention of the west far far
| overshadow the meager spying that took place during the watergate
| debacle.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Not that I would agree, but this is the standard accounting
| practice of record labels and publishers for at least the last 50
| years.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| 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.
| RankingMember wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lolinder wrote:
| Yep, and calling it Audiblegate is just symptomatic of the
| general quality of the thinking that went into the post. It's
| lazy reasoning cloaked behind the language of internet outrage.
| wccrawford wrote:
| This has bothered me for some time now. Most of these handy
| portmanteaus don't really bother me, but this one makes _no_
| sense on its own and just sounds stupid. Sure, I know what they
| mean, but I cringe every time.
| [deleted]
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Replygate?
| octagonal wrote:
| Language can change and words can take up new meanings.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Yes but that shouldn't be an excuse for being lazy.
| entangledqubit wrote:
| Tangential. The claim about the $0.15 / MB delivery fee on Kindle
| ebooks makes AWS egress charges look cheap.
| pas wrote:
| the what? :D
|
| do they have some amazing team that comes up with these?
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| I think this thread is excessively vague and potentially taking
| advantage of ignorance on how precisely audible is shady. It
| seems to assume the royalty statements should come out of list
| price, but in actuality audible has multiple list prices- is it
| cash or credit? is it regular or premium subscription? These all
| are quite different and pay out differently. If it is such that
| audible is paying 40% less than it should based on its own price
| tiers though that's a whole other story and worth massive lawsuit
| money.
| [deleted]
| axxl wrote:
| 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 increase in sales made up for the 'deal' off audiobooks. I
| get $50-$60 audiobooks for $15, there's something mismatched
| there. Either the audiobook was priced at an extreme premium, or,
| it seems, Amazon just isn't paying the price I would expect.
|
| Edit: I found one response from an author that I think makes a
| simple point, if not perhaps what the thread describes (still
| can't tell). It's impossible for authors to calculate their
| expected royalties as there are so many varieties of discounts
| and price points that customers can pay for a single book:
| https://twitter.com/AdamEcclesBooks/status/14933236569105489...
|
| Which makes sense to me, as there's purchases and credits and
| various subscription tiers and audible unlimited and these are
| just the things I can think up off the top of my head. But again,
| I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I have purchased
| at full price.
| jsnell wrote:
| 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 credits spent on
| that book, but weighted by the retail price. I.e. a credit
| spent on a long expensive book pays the narrator more than the
| same credit spent on a medium length book, even though the
| credit cost the same to customer.
|
| There's an undocumented revenue floor for price tranche of
| books. If the revenues per copy would end up lower than the
| floor in a billing period due to e.g. some promotion that
| flooded the economy with cheap credits, Audible makes up the
| difference and pays the narrator at least that minimum amount
| per copy. 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.
|
| Since the credits are far cheaper than the retail prices, it
| should hardly be surprising that the effective sales price is
| cheaper than the retail price.
| troupe wrote:
| 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.
| axxl wrote:
| > there's no substance just a lot of charged language.
|
| Yeah, this was my issue with all I could find so far. It
| seems like 'working as designed'. Perhaps those who publish
| on audible would like to be able to opt in or out of various
| sales/credits etc but as a customer I prefer that I can get
| anything with a credit.
|
| > Basically Audible splits the money spent on credits among
| the books that the credits were spent on, except weighted by
| the retail price
|
| Is that _all_ credits in the system (similar to how Spotify
| was weighting streaming subscriptions (to my understanding)),
| or per user. I would prefer the money from my credits to go
| to the books I purchase, not be weighted with purchases by
| all other users.
| jsnell wrote:
| Across the system, not per-user.
|
| The only funky thing is that IIUC the computation of the
| total income across the whole system is done based on
| credits sold that month, rather than deferring the income
| from selling a credit to the month in which the credit is
| spent.
| Thorrez wrote:
| That funky thing sounds like it would work in authors'
| favor overall. I would guess there's some percent of
| credits that are sold but never used. So if Amazon only
| paid on on used credits, Amazon would be able to keep
| that money. If Amazon pays out on sold credits, the
| authors get it. Although the distribution between the
| authors can be wrong, leading to some individual authors
| losing out even if authors overall benefit.
|
| Although if Amazon is always paying out some contractual
| minimum instead of the shared amount, then none of this
| makes a difference.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| I wonder if authors are the ones who pay for the free
| Audible subscriptions that American Express Platinum card
| holders get now?
|
| There is a huge a "Hollywood accounting" problem that
| never really went away (it's how Warner Brothers markets
| HBO Max for free, how bands on major labels & even indies
| never recoup, and now possibly know how Amazon grows
| audible at no cost to themselves).
| wyattpeak wrote:
| It seems pretty surprising to me. When the supermarket offers
| a discount, they don't then turn to their providers and say
| "since we sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you
| less for it".
|
| The terms on which Amazon want to offer Audiobooks are their
| business, but as I consumer I certainly wouldn't expect them
| to affect any downline incomes.
| prepend wrote:
| > When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then
| turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a
| discount,
|
| Yes, they do actually. They organize sales and have
| temporary reduced prices sold to customers and paid to
| suppliers. That's why some cereals go on sale and others
| don't. It's not like they decide to take a loss only on
| Kelloggs cereal. The discount is because they pay less to
| manufacturers.
|
| Similarly for audible, the contract stipulates this. So I
| think it would be wrong if Audible unilaterally decided to
| not pay authors. But they didn't do that, they have a
| contract, signed by authors that lets them put books on
| sale and pay less.
| ShroudedNight wrote:
| > they don't then turn to their providers and say "since we
| sold this at a discount, we're going to pay you less for
| it".
|
| Not necessarily because of sales, but one of my parents'
| neighbours (he was previously a fairly senior guy at a
| flour manufacturer) spoke from experience of big
| supermarket retailers "renegotiating" unit price after the
| fact (and after delaying payment until duress) under the
| threat of removing _all_ their products from sale if they
| don 't accept.
| eru wrote:
| Aldi has such a good relationship with suppliers, because
| --despite driving rather hard bargains up front--they do
| stick to what they agreed to pay and don't pull
| shenanigans.
| djrogers wrote:
| > When the supermarket offers a discount, they don't then
| turn to their providers and say "since we sold this at a
| discount, we're going to pay you less for it".
|
| No, they negotiate those things ahead of time. It does t
| matter though, as there's a huge difference between an item
| that is infinitely reproducible and a commodity that has
| per-unit production costs.
| wyattpeak wrote:
| Nah, I disagree with you there. I don't think the nature
| of the product being sold affects my opinion or
| expectation of whether or not producers are expected to
| shoulder the cost of a discount given by a middleman.
|
| For the record, I also disagree with your blanket claim
| that supermarket discounts are negotiated ahead of time.
| _Some_ are.
| gnicholas wrote:
| So this means Audible can have promotions ("first month
| free!") and basically share the CAC with the producers?
| matsemann wrote:
| > _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
| campaign or whatever, that's a cost they should take. Not
| just dictate what the price should be and pay royalties based
| on that.
| lolinder wrote:
| And why shouldn't Audible set the price? No one signed up
| as a creator on Audible thinking they'd get let out of the
| credits system. That system _is_ Audible 's business model.
| It's how they sell so many books.
|
| I've bought _many_ audiobooks for one credit that I never
| would have bought at list price. Most creators ' net
| revenue from me would be zero if I had to pay the full list
| price.
| [deleted]
| troupe wrote:
| 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.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Without having read the whole page, I understand form your
| summary that:
|
| A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their price
|
| B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the price,
| but in reality this credit system destroys that %% completely
|
| C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each
| book, irrespective of the price sold.
|
| D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they can,
| underprice all competitors with cheap credits, and overall
| corner the market to make sure producers can't get around
| them.
|
| Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power. In a
| competitive environment no producer would accept this.
| jsnell wrote:
| > A) amazon alone decides when to float credits and their
| price
|
| Yes.
|
| > B) authors are promised a certain rate (40%) of the
| price, but in reality this credit system destroys that %%
| completely
|
| No. They are not promised a rate of the retail price. They
| are promised a share of the net sales of credits,
| proportional to how many of the credits were spent on their
| books. They should know the key parts of the business model
| here: Audible sell the credits for significantly cheaper
| than the retail price, and the narrators are being paid
| based on the actual amount spent on the credits not based
| on the retail price.
|
| > C) in the end amazon makes always a >60% profit off each
| book, irrespective of the price sold.
|
| No. The minimum revenue per-book guarantee is being hit
| every single month. So the narrators are being paid a
| bigger share than the contract promised, and Amazon is
| paying that difference from their cut.
|
| > D) Their incentive is thus to sell as many units as they
| can,
|
| And since the earlier points were incorrect, this
| conclusion doesn't actually follow.
| eru wrote:
| You don't have to put your audiobook on audible..
| gwd wrote:
| > Total monopolistic practices with abuse of market power.
| In a competitive environment no producer would accept this.
|
| Hasn't Audible's business model been basically unchanged
| since its inception? Everyone who puts their books on their
| knows the price of a credit, which is normally like $15,
| and so knows they'd get at best $6 per book sold on there.
| How would Audible _become_ a monopoly if people didn 't
| like those odds?
|
| Furthermore, I don't see much of a "moat" here. Suppose
| there was a company called BetterBooks, which had the same
| business model and price per credit, but gave 60%
| commission instead of 40%. If publishers were genuinely
| unhappy with $6/book, they could list it on BetterBooks and
| get $9/book instead. The quality of books on Audible would
| drop, and nobody would buy them.
| LeonB wrote:
| The moat is massive.
|
| Their existing market power means that by not being on
| audible you're walking away from most of your potential
| readers. That bit doesnt seem too bad...
|
| But then - they offer you a very low percentage if you
| sell your book anywhere else... and a not so terrible %
| if you go with them (not great, but not terrible).
|
| For an individual seller it is worth taking that deal. So
| they do. But the consequence is that no other market can
| achieve comparable power.
|
| Hence it's an abuse of market power. Individual
| publishers choices won't stop it- only government
| intervention. And further it would need to have
| international cooperation.
|
| Which also explains why they're lazy about fixing trivial
| temporary errors whether they are gaining or losing money
| -- they own the market, and don't need to worries about
| pennies.
| gwd wrote:
| > But then - they offer you a very low percentage if you
| sell your book anywhere else... and a not so terrible %
| if you go with them (not great, but not terrible).
|
| Audible's network effects can only be dislodged by people
| _not listing their books on Audible at all_ ; so this
| shouldn't have much of an effect.
|
| > For an individual seller it is worth taking that deal.
| So they do. But the consequence is that no other market
| can achieve comparable power.
|
| Right; so the approach would be for BetterBooks, before
| launch, to talk privately to a large number of
| publishers, with an offer like, "You agree to drop
| Audible and only go with us for 3 years, if we can get
| 60% of publishers to agree to do the same." If Audible's
| deal is really as horrible as this person is making out,
| it should be easy for any individual publisher to agree
| to that; and easy to get 60% of publishers on board. Then
| when BetterBooks launches, they have loads of great
| titles which Audible is lacking.
| LeonB wrote:
| _if_ it was easy as you say... it would take a massive
| investment - and that's a demonstration of a moat right
| there.
|
| But it wouldn't be that easy - because Amazon can afford
| to give better deals to the top 1% of popular authors and
| thus the cost to achieve what you're saying would be far
| higher.
| LeonB wrote:
| > Audible's network effects can only be dislodged by
| people not listing their books on Audible at all; so this
| shouldn't have much of an effect.
|
| This isn't quite right and misses most of what's going
| on.
|
| Since a book that's exclusive to A can't appear on B - B
| can never get any network effects and thus can't compete
| with A.
|
| And if B did begin to get any network effects - through
| an innovative technique ( Eg when book depository made
| ground by offering free shipping) -- A would take notice
| and simply _buy_ B before it was a big enough threat.
|
| Hence again - individuals and normal market forces can't
| displace an established monopolist.
|
| And the moat is huge.
| gwd wrote:
| > Since a book that's exclusive to A can't appear on B -
| B can never get any network effects and thus can't
| compete with A.
|
| Indeed, and it should probably be illegal for a company
| with a monopoly to buy exclusivity as Amazon is doing.
| But even if the Justice Department took interest and
| Audible switched to (say) 35% across the board, that
| wouldn't by itself be enough to dislodge Audible's
| network effects.
|
| That's why I described a plan of attack which wouldn't
| involve the Justice Department: Rather than starting B
| and asking publishers to list on both A and B, start B
| and ask publishers to list _only_ on B (or at least, not
| on A). That would jump-start the network effects on B.
|
| It would require publishers to accept lower profits for a
| few years while B was getting established and A lost
| brand; but if the pricing really rises to the level of
| _abusive_ (as opposed to just less than they think is
| fair), publishers should be willing to do that.
|
| > And if B did begin to get any network effects - through
| an innovative technique ( Eg when book depository made
| ground by offering free shipping) -- A would take notice
| and simply buy B before it was a big enough threat.
|
| Well yes, which is why such acquisitions should be
| prevented.
| LeonB wrote:
| Ok I think we're agreement on some fundamentals here
| about market manipulation and monopolies etc.
|
| Regarding your idea of a scheme to sneak up on and out-
| fox the market leader... by simply enacting a secret
| conspiracy amongst a quorum of suppliers:
|
| I do love and admire the idea, I think it's good stuff
| and could for example be an interesting movie.
|
| (Actually- one with a similar plot was filmed in my home
| town when I was a child- some minor prospectors set up an
| arbitrage situation that turned a monopolistic evil gem
| dealer against himself... great stuff, and the mayor of
| my home town got a cameo in one scene).
|
| Bit in reality - outside of fiction - as an actual
| serious method for unseating a monopoly, I don't think
| the shot is even on the board. I don't know enough laws
| to see which ones it would break, but I expect there are
| dozens. But without pondering legalities, fundamentally I
| see it failing because the conspiracy, among _competing_
| suppliers, is effectively a non-iterated prisoners
| dilemma. It's better for any semi popular author
| /publisher to rat on the conspirators and secure a higher
| exclusive deal from A, than to be online with the B
| group.
|
| But the first problem is that to fulfill the claim that
| the existence of such a remote possibility demonstrates
| that there is "not much of moat" is where I think it
| really falls down. If you have a technique for achieving
| a coup like this without getting out the wallet, then
| please by all means prove me wrong and simply step
| forward and achieve this scheme. Schemes that have the
| predicate "If only and not until everyone agrees to do
| "X" then it would benefit us all" - is generally not
| sufficient _all by itself_ to bring about the agreement.
| It takes capital and _lots_ of it.
| djrogers wrote:
| > But again, I would buy a small fraction of the audiobooks I
| have purchased at full price.
|
| I've got ~300 audible books in my library, and I can safely say
| I'd have bought exactly none of them at full price.
| prepend wrote:
| Same here. The only time I've bought a book is when the price
| is less than $14.95.
|
| The author seems disingenuous to propose that the retail
| price in audible is anything that anyone expects. I assume
| he's not stupid and is aware of this so not bringing up this
| point is misleading.
|
| It's like if someone wrote a blog post enraged that BMG
| Record Club wasn't paying them out a percent of retail prices
| without pointing out that BMG's whole model was 10 CDs for a
| penny and then 2 for the price of one (or whatever the
| ridiculous price scheme was).
| 83457 wrote:
| You should listen to better books then.
| function_seven wrote:
| I think you're misunderstanding OP.
|
| The way Audible book pricing works is a little byzantine.
| The "list" price of most titles is somewhere in the
| neighborhood of $50. Plus or minus.
|
| But as a subscriber you're given one credit each month, for
| $15. So right there you can get the same title for much
| cheaper if it's your credit redemption.
|
| But that's not all. If you buy the Kindle edition of a
| book, it's only $7.50 or so to add on narration with the
| purchase. The text copy of the title might be $9.99, so the
| total is still far less than the "naked" audiobook price.
|
| I don't understand why they do it this way. Even if I'm out
| of credits, I can save $40 or so by getting the
| Kindle+Audio bundle vs. just the Audible version alone.
| degeberg wrote:
| If you run out of credits, you can also buy 3 extra for
| PS18 (I'm not sure what the USD price is). That's
| significantly cheaper than buying 3 audio books at full
| price.
|
| Credits with frequent 2-for-1 sales, PS3 sales and PS1
| sales, there is just no reason to ever pay retail price
| on Audible.
| eru wrote:
| I suspect the retail price is just there as a
| psychological suggestion to make you think you are
| getting a good deal with the credits.
| conjectures wrote:
| Yes, also because then it feels less like you're
| committing to buying N books per month from a particular
| vendor.
| gwd wrote:
| Back in the 90's I bought several audiobooks on tape for
| long car journeys; the retail prices listed on Audible
| seem similar to the price I actually paid back in the
| day. A lot of the titles are also available on iTunes as
| well, and the prices were comparable to the retail price
| listed on Audible. Audible really _is_ a good deal.
| 83457 wrote:
| Most of the audible books I buy are in the $25-35 range
| full price. There are a few I've listened to multiple
| times and now could certainly justify spending full price
| for them.
|
| With that said, I do think I misinterpreted what they
| were saying, which was more speaking to the original
| outcome if full price than what they would do now
| regarding each book.
| matsemann wrote:
| And those promotions should be a cost of Amazon, not the
| authors. Weird how Amazon can take your product, sell it for
| a quarter of the price, and then claim they now owe you no
| money.
| gwd wrote:
| Audible's whole business model is to sell monthly credits
| on subscription for $15, which can be used to purchase
| _any_ audiobook. That 's not a "promotion", that's how
| Audible works.
|
| Now they do also have sales where they sell books for like
| $5 or something; if those sales are not opt-in, of course
| that's a problem. But I have a hard time believing they're
| not opt-in.
| eru wrote:
| Eh, a company should be free to offer any bad deal they can
| dream up.
|
| If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that offer.
| CraneWorm wrote:
| > If you don't like it, your job is to turn down that
| offer.
|
| Sure, and disappear, because you're not listed by the bad
| deal company that has container-ships-of-money for
| marketing.
| falcolas wrote:
| I haven't dug into it too deeply myself, but here's some
| numbers from late last year. Note that this as a producer
| sharing that 40% with the writer half and half (royalty share
| contract). One month saw 21 sales of a $19.99 audiobook. Amazon
| reported net sales of $76, so I made around $11.
|
| EDIT: looking closer, 17 of the sales occurred in a
| market/purchase combination that resulted in no royalties at
| all. The invoice is less than clear on why those markets have
| 0% royalty rates. The US market is split in two, one with the
| expected rate, one with 0. No guesses on how the counts lined
| up.
|
| So, around 2% real royalty rates, or 10x less than the contract
| stipulated.
|
| It's not something worth fighting against for me right now, I'm
| using it to build a resume. But between this and the rampant
| fraud they do nothing to curb, it's not a stretch to call it a
| scam, both for the producer and the author.
|
| But it's Audible. What choice is there?
|
| EDIT2: Going to bed. Its not that I don't like you.
| HotHotLava wrote:
| > But it's Audible. What choice is there?
|
| I mean, at $11 a year it doesn't sound like Audible is a
| critical part of your income, so why not create a gumroad
| account and sell directly from the authors and/or narrators
| website? It sounds like you could even offer a heavily
| discounted price and still come out ahead.
|
| If enough producers come together this way you could even
| create some producer's co-op that can put up a basic webshop
| and account system.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Yeah the funny thing is that AWS, GCP, Azure and so on
| provide all the infrastructure to cheaply distribute
| audiobooks on your own.
|
| All we need now is for someone to sit down and write an
| open source tool for it.
|
| I'm a dreamer but I see a world where audiobook creators
| can create an account on a privately hosted instance, sort
| of like bookwyrm but with payment features, promote their
| work using ActivityPub in a federated way, and distribute
| the media p2p using something like peertube.
|
| And consumers can hear the media in any of a number of
| clients.
| wccrawford wrote:
| It's not just distribution, but also the player. I tried
| other players in the past and had problems with them.
| When Audible's just worked and was reliable, I stuck with
| it. I can't be alone in that thinking.
|
| Perhaps there are better players now, but if you're going
| to distribute the audio book on your own store, I think
| you need to be ready to recommend a good player for each
| OS your customer might be on. And it had better actually
| be a good player, or people will be upset with you, too.
| axxl wrote:
| Got it, so it seems like the contract is just heavily skewed
| in favor of Amazon, where the content is subsidizing all of
| the deals and discounts that Audible provides. Although how
| they can get a 0% royalty on certain sales in is baffling to
| me.
|
| > But it's Audible. What choice is there?
|
| Yeah, they sadly seem to be lacking in meaningful
| competition. People on twitter are talking about libro.fm
| which has a slew of anti-audible articles, although I can't
| find any details on their reimbursements either.
| prepend wrote:
| > Although how they can get a 0% royalty on certain sales
| in is baffling to me.
|
| Wouldn't this be a situation where they gave out
| promotional copies through free trials and stuff like that?
| falcolas wrote:
| It looks like promotional codes are indeed the cause.
| That said, promo codes are also be sold through third
| parties. I think that's what's happened in my case.
| falcolas wrote:
| > Got it, so it seems like the contract is just heavily
| skewed in favor of Amazon, where the content is subsidizing
| all of the deals and discounts that Audible provides.
|
| With how much guff Apple and Google get for their 30% cuts,
| and they don't offer all kinds of "unauthorized" discounts
| off the retail price... yeah, Amazon's being a bad actor
| here.
| throwthere wrote:
| Thanks for giving actual data. My take is many producers are
| surprised about the royalty share-- Amazon could be more
| upfront with expected revenue.
|
| The terms are monopolistic, but I mean, they have a monopoly.
| falcolas wrote:
| The 60% cut is egregious and deserves more condemnation,
| especially with how much people gripe about Apple,
| Google's, and other parties 30% cut of payments.
|
| Plus, I have yet to see a single retail price purchase. The
| biggest price someone has paid for a book I've seen a
| royalty payment on was $4.50.
| eyejay wrote:
| Does your contract have the retail price in it? Or were the
| net sales $76? I don't think both of those can be true.
| falcolas wrote:
| The retail price is on the storefront. It's determined by
| the length of the finished audiobook. The net sales show no
| full priced retail purchases. 13 of the sales were from US
| customers using free credits, which were valued at $1 each.
| Of course, those also fell in the 0% royalties category to
| add insult to... well, I don't know what to call it
| anymore.
| [deleted]
| sdoering wrote:
| 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 40% exclusive
| royalty (as a not so well known author I assume) was very
| little earnings per book. Without providing context that
| already was him trying to weapponize my opinion (at least that
| was how it felt to me).
|
| Publishing that one feels there is an error on Audibles side in
| calculating royalties is not only legitimate but appreciated by
| me. I want to know that errors occur and ideally how they are
| fixed. Trying to manipulate me into enragement "porn" and
| wesponizing public outrage might be good for business or might
| feel like a valid approach when feeling wronged by Goliath but
| is - at least on my side - just off-putting.
|
| So I do wish for all authors to be compensated based on the
| contracts they have with Audible. But I couldn't care less
| about this person's vendetta.
| alphabetting wrote:
| > 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?
| lolinder wrote:
| They explicitly say in the thread that they're trying to
| get enough people angry that Audible changes the deal.
| chime wrote:
| Audible calculates Net Sales in A La Carte and Membership mode
| [1]. Is the membership mode closer to Pro-Rata mode like Spotify
| [2] or the User-Centric mode. Is the claim that Net Sales are
| shady with respect to either or both? Because pro-rata is hard to
| calculate and predict. Either way, this is a very complicated
| matter that affects the livelihoods of thousands of authors and
| producers but the lack of specific details makes it hard to
| understand what's really going on.
|
| Audible has had to change policies based on author complaints [3]
| and rightly so. But the claim of "Net Sales" being correct or
| incorrect is hard to prove without Audible releasing the detailed
| data like the authors are asking for. Frankly this seems like a
| matter best decided by lawyers in arbitration instead of Twitter-
| threads but maybe online pressure is the best way the authors can
| get Audible to come to the table.
|
| Either way, good luck to them. There are so many laws around
| sales, returns, commissions, royalties etc. that have evolved
| over the last century or two to protect all parties. But it's a
| wild west in the subscription world where Apple/Google control
| app markets, Netflix/Disney control TV/movie subs,
| Spotify/Apple/Amazon control music streams,
| YouTube/Tiktok/FB/Twitch control video streams. Each platform has
| their own rules, payment sharing, metric calculation etc. And
| while users can switch if the product sucks and platform owners
| can ban users or producers based on ToS violations, the producers
| barely have any power or say because there's almost no profitable
| alternative left.
|
| If this was 1960s, users and producers would definitely fight for
| some basic standards and guarantees across all platforms (e.g.
| right to pause/cancel easily, allowing usage from multiple
| locations, right to review/audit records etc.) But in 2020s with
| trillion dollar market cap companies running the show, I'm not
| sure that users or producers get a say in how they are treated
| anymore. Best we can hope for is a new entrant that is better for
| a few years.
|
| 1. https://www.acx.com/help/HJSJJK8XP7HYURS
|
| 2. https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2021/11/how-spotify-
| royaltie...
|
| 3. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/26/audible-
| adjust...
| jbverschoor wrote:
| 30% doesn't seem too bad compared to 60-75% huh
| merlinscholz wrote:
| https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1492810241372741636.html
| leoc wrote:
| Also https://www.audiblegate.com/post/audible-royalties-ain-t-
| roy... . I may submit this separately.
| pvg wrote:
| It would be a dupe since it's the same story. It's probably a
| better submission though, so you could email the mods to
| replace URL on this one.
| joelkesler wrote:
| Please do. This is alarming
| MaysonL wrote:
| Many on HN would say that Apple's 30% cut on App Store sales is
| perhaps unfair.
|
| Is Amazon's 75% or 60% unfair, or is it highway robbery? Not to
| mention what they actually pay instead of the contractual amount.
| contravariant wrote:
| Could anyone clarify if that 75% includes the cost of narrating
| the audiobook?
| microtherion wrote:
| I have published neither an app nor an audiobook, but my
| impression is that Apple both takes a far lower cut of the
| price and is considerably more transparent in how the
| advertised price translates to the royalty paid out. And
| Audible seems to have far more market control than Apple has.
|
| Yet in HN discussions, people seem far more inclined to defend
| Amazon's practices than Apple's. I wonder whether the reason is
| that a lot more of them make their living off writing software
| than off publishing audiobooks (but maybe there is some other
| factor there that I'm missing).
|
| [Disclosure: Apple employee & shareholder, not involved in
| store related activities, not speaking for Apple]
| lolinder wrote:
| The difference here is that with Audible, the comparison is to
| traditional _book_ publishing models. By all accounts, a 40%
| royalty (even on net sales) is pretty darn good by that
| standard.
|
| Apple's 30% fee, in contrast, is compared to traditional
| _software_ publishing models. Developers are used to being able
| to publish on Windows or web without paying commission to
| anyone.
| vzaliva wrote:
| the twitter thread and linked web page are doing poor job making
| the case agains audible. Someone should be able to write a
| succinct 1 page summary in plain English explaining the scheme
| coherently.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I've spent a lot of money on Audible (and have a subscription)
| and part of the reason is because I can return books if they wind
| up being awful or are simply poorly produced (tin-sounding audio,
| awful narrator, clipped audio, etc.)
| prescriptivist wrote:
| I agree, the return policy is a feature not a bug. However I
| have been surprised at the generous timeframe within which I'm
| allowed to return a book. Seems like there is a compromise to
| be had there.
| GiorgioG wrote:
| I don't abuse it. If I enjoy a book, I keep it - even though
| I'll likely never listen to it again. But if I slog through
| half of a book (depending on the book it could take a month
| or more to get to that point) and it feels like an awful slog
| - I have no qualms returning it, no matter how long it's been
| since I purchased it.
|
| I prefer to keep things as they are.
| rplnt wrote:
| It needs to be repeated that twitter is the worst medium for
| anything like this.
|
| Also, don't hook people with "40% is too low", because it isn't,
| and you might lose them before getting to the point. Especially
| easy on twitter, see above.
| [deleted]
| kkjjkgjjgg wrote:
| Why wouldn't royalities be based in "net sales"? I didn't finish
| reading the linked article to the end, because it is so long
| without much substance. Does it actually describe any of the
| alleged manipulation of the "net sales" numbers?
|
| In the first half or so, all they mention is that "returned" or
| "exchanged" books don't count, which seems reasonable.
| barneygale wrote:
| Amazon needs to be broken up into hundreds of smaller companies.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I know I'm against the grain here, but I don't have much
| sympathy.
|
| Firstly, no-one is forcing them to sell through Amazon/Audible.
| They don't have to. They could build their own storefront, with
| all the effort and cost that goes with that.
|
| Secondly, _publishers_ are complaining about shady accounting and
| crooked royalty payments? _Publishers_ of all people? Oh, the
| irony.
|
| Thirdly, presumably they've done the calculations, and even with
| the shady royalty payments it's still worth their while going
| through A/A rather than selling elsewhere (presumably because
| A/A's reach is far bigger than anything they can do on their
| own). This is about "we want more of the pie", though granted
| it's "we want the share of the pie that we were promised".
|
| Lastly, publishers will happily stiff everyone else when they
| have the power. Appealing to the masses to help them when the
| shoe is on the other foot is pathetic. I'm much more inclined to
| schadenfreude than sympathy.
| delgaudm wrote:
| 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 might guess. A skilled narrator might produce a finished
| hour of audio in 5 hours, and a less skilled narrator may take 10
| to 12 hours to create that same finished hour. So for a 10 hour
| audiobook a narrator will have between 50 and 100 hours of work,
| depending on the material and the production skills of the
| narrator.
|
| It can take literally _years_ to earn $500 to $1000 in royalties
| -- thats $10 /hr -- on a book. And most books never sell enough
| audiobook copies. And that's why any narrator who understands
| this should _never_ accept and ACX / Audible exclusive Royalty
| share audiobook deal.
|
| Now with this Audiblegate revelation it's all to clear that we
| narrators are destined to never make our money back.
| napsterbr wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why does it take 5-12 hours to record one
| finished hour?
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| 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.
| prepend wrote:
| When I make my video lectures for my class it takes about
| two hours for every one hour of video. That includes
| writing a transcript, edits, re-recording parts, posting,
| and even the encoding.
|
| Obviously this will vary per person but I'm not very good
| at videos and that's how long it takes.
|
| I don't get paid for videos it's just part of my course. If
| I was a professional video maker, I think it would take me
| much less time.
|
| But if someone is really slow at a task, perhaps it's not
| economical for them to do that task.
|
| I'm an amazing car washer. I wash a car like no other. But
| I take three hours and no one will pay my hourly rate. That
| doesn't mean that my employer who pays me by the wash is
| bad, it means I shouldn't wash cars for them.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Presumably multiple takes and editing.
|
| I think he's ignoring the chance of recording a really
| popular audiobook though. I'd guess that's why people take
| royalty deals that they probably know will likely not pay
| well. Basically gambling.
| [deleted]
| playpause wrote:
| 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.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 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.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| Does the narrator need to be involved in making edits, re-
| listen to recorded book, cutting and rearranging unwanted
| silences? Other than the occasional line redo if something
| is flubbed or off I don't see how that involves the
| narrator?
| delgaudm wrote:
| In many cases in the ACX world the narrator does it all.
| All the production falls to the narrator.
| playpause wrote:
| It's not just the odd flubbed line, it's loads of
| problems. I hear a lot of stories about it. Sometimes the
| narrator's pronunciation of a weird name can drift, very
| gradually, and the engineer then has to go a long way
| back to figure out where the drift started, and get them
| to restart from there. It has to sound natural and
| flowing, so no you can't just re-record individual lines
| and splice them in later, they would stand out and it
| would sound shit. That's why it can take up to a few
| hours to get one hour of audio down. (But not 5-12 hours,
| he says that's a huge exaggeration.)
| breakfastduck wrote:
| That's not the narrators job though, is it? And the comment
| was about the narrators input.
| playpause wrote:
| 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.
| delgaudm wrote:
| This is correct.
| nigerian1981 wrote:
| "Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!"
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yeah this is the difference between professionals and less
| experienced narrators.
|
| I'm not buying the 5h/h thing neither. How long is an average
| audiobook? Booking studio time, etc for that plus the heavy
| editing that a 5h take would take is just not worth it.
| delgaudm wrote:
| Your housemate is wrong. Or, not thinking it through. Or, has
| ever narrated as a primary income earning job.
|
| That's like saying "Those 20 lines of code you wrote are only
| like 90 words. You type at 40WPM, so it took you what 2,
| maybe three minutes to write?" You and I both know that's
| utterly uncorrect.
|
| Your housemate might be thinking only of the "talking into
| the microphone part", and assumes that the narrator only
| makes mistakes on a line a few times in an hour. There are
| some excellent cold readers out there, but in my experience
| that's just not the case for the majority.
|
| And for the vast majority of the time in the ACX world, the
| narrator is also doing your housemate's job.
|
| As someone who's been narrating for about 10 years with
| hundreds of hours of finished audio under my belt, here's how
| it breaks down:
|
| - Rehearsal / Prereading. A narrator needs to know what's
| going to happen so they can properly act a line. So you have
| to read the text in advance. No one should expect a narrator
| to read a work of fiction cold and get it perfect on the
| first try. YOu need to rehearse, or at least get familiar
| with the text. Let's say that's 30 minutes because you read
| faster than you narrate. If it's a work of fiction and you've
| got a number of different characters you need to create and
| voice consistently it can mean additional prep work.
| Characters don't just come out, first try, fully realized.
|
| - Actual recording. By definition this cannot be less than
| one hour, but that assumes an absolutely perfect read for one
| hour. In my experience it's probably a minimum 1.5x
| multiplier for retakes, mistakes, line fixes if you do punch
| and roll. So 1.5 hours. Complex fiction with lots of
| characters could take a significantly longer. Of course there
| are amazing narrators out there who can do this, but that is
| the vast minority.
|
| So, We're up to 2 hours already, minimum.
|
| Now that it's recorded you need to do a QA pass -- you should
| listen to what's been recorded and make any adjustments to
| timing, breaths, volume riding, effects, compression, EQ, and
| to identify and correct errors. You shouldn't ship untested
| code, you shouldn't ship untested audio. In many ACX cases,
| the narrator also performs this job.
|
| If it's absolutely perfect on the first try it's another hour
| (unless you're QA'ing at a faster than 1.0x reading speed,
| then you're ignoring all the technical checks, and only
| validating narration checks). Again, in many ACX cases, the
| narrator does this job too.
|
| There are almost always pickups (redoing mistakes you find)
| in an hour of text, for missed words, dropped lines, bad line
| interpretation, reversed words, etc... The audio should be
| letter perfect to the text, so even the slightest mistake
| should be fixed. Any pickup will take time to get right. If
| you interpret a line wring it can influence the outcome for
| the character. You need to get the line reads right. Skilled
| narrators can punch in a correction perfectly with just a
| take or two, but some lines can require multiple tries and
| full minutes to get right. Especially if it's the next day
| and you need to warm up again so you can sound like you did
| before, (your voice changes as you narrate) so there is a
| multiplier. call it 1.5x
|
| Now we're to 3.5 hours. Your friend may disagree, this is my
| experience after doing this a long time.
|
| Finally you have to master it and get it delivered to ACX.
| This can be largely streamlined, but it takes time to ensure
| you meet ACX's technical standards. Let's say you get it
| perfect on the first try. Call it 15 minutes to render,
| label, upload and pass the ACX checks.
|
| We're to 3 hours 45 minutes.
|
| A narrator needs to warm up before a session so that they
| sound consistent from session to session. When you're warming
| up for a gig, you're not working on another gig, so the time
| goes to the current project. Maybe you can multitask and QA
| yesterday's work while your warming up, but it's hard to do
| critical listening while you're humming and stretching and
| reciting toungue twisters. Call the warm up 15 minutes. Maybe
| less maybe more. But Most narrators cannot narrate for 8
| hours a day. There is a limit to preserve the voice, and
| breaks must be taken to preserve your voice not only for the
| session, but for your work. So warming up is part of the gig,
| you're working and you need to factor that time in to
| creating the finished audio.
|
| So, We're at 4 hours. And that's if you're really skilled and
| great at it and working at high efficiency. You know your DAW
| inside and out, and you have the voices down perfectly every
| time.
|
| For many narrators there is an efficiency factor to build in.
| Narrating is physically demanding as it requires a great deal
| of sustained concentration -- not to dissimilar to coding.
| After a long narrating session you might not have the mental
| energy required for the sustained attention to detail to
| perform QA. (Similar to how it's difficult to debug code
| right away, and you find errors the next day when you're
| fresh)
|
| In my experience that adds 30 minutes work to get the
| finished audio right and out the door.
|
| So, yeah, a finished hour of audio can easily take 4 to 5
| hours for an experienced narrator to create. Less skilled
| narrators who make more mistakes, take longer to edit, take
| longer to punch in corrections, take longer to meet the
| technical standards can easily get to 8 to 10 hours PFH. Just
| like a junior dev makes more mistakes and takes longer than a
| senior dev.
|
| I coach newer voice actors all the time. I know from real
| experience how long this takes.
| raverbashing wrote:
| Thanks for the thorough response. But I think the parent
| was talking specifically about "actual time narrating at
| the microphone" and I agree with him.
|
| I agree with you of course, as well. But most of the stuff
| besides narration is not recording time. It's time you need
| to do the job, sure.
| delgaudm wrote:
| Sure, in the context of the original post, if you're
| figuring out what you got paid for your time, then all
| the stuff counts, not just time behind the mic.
| gideon_b wrote:
| I don't know anything about this industry but I listen to a
| lot of audiobooks. I have always wondered how the narration
| actually works, what the job is like. Sometimes I can hear
| the changes and it opened up a whole world of me wondering
| what that process looks like. This was an excellent
| description, thank you!
| pas wrote:
| > it can take literally years to earn $500 to $1000 in
| royalties
|
| but then it goes on forever, right? (as long as copyright
| lasts)
|
| (sure, the NPV probably still sucks due to time value of money)
| duxup wrote:
| Have they asked Audible to explain what numbers they have / for
| an explication?
|
| I don't feel like the twitter thread was detailed enough to be
| sure what is happening.
| parkingrift wrote:
| > As AB producers, we're supposed to get 40% if we host our AB
| exclusively in Audible, or 25% if we go 'wide' and use other
| retailers.
|
| This should be absolutely illegal.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| People should be able to contract for whatever they want,
| provided it isn't illegal. This doesn't seem usurious or
| anything like that, what's your particular objection?
| worldmerge wrote:
| What was the audio book market like back in the cassette days? My
| gramma used to listen to books on tape all the time mostly
| through the library.
| prepend wrote:
| I used to buy 2-3 per year at $30-50 each. There wasn't a big
| selection and typically only best sellers would on the shelves
| at Waldenbooks or Cracker Barrel.
|
| Amazon helped quite a bit as prices dropped by 30% and I bought
| 4-5 per year until audible. I was an audible subscriber for 10
| years until my library got Libby. Not as good but free and I
| can read more now.
|
| The market seems 100x as big both due to cost and ease of use.
| Switching cassettes and CDs was a pain.
| monocasa wrote:
| As the 90s cartoon character 'Freakazoid' taught me:
|
| > Always ask for a piece of the gross; the net is just fantasy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHL91HQzhuc
| scrame wrote:
| Twitter is the most obnoxious way to make a point.
| mcgin wrote:
| Is there a viable alternative to Audible out there?
| Aachen wrote:
| The author mentioned, and the only one I know of, is buying
| directly from the publishers.
|
| Problem is: those are ridiculously expensive, like 35 euros for
| a single audio book that I don't even know if I'll like the
| contents because you can't browse it. Physical books are
| usually 15 euros and then you have unit and shipping costs.
| Somehow the publisher is fine putting it on audible (where I
| pay EUR10) and getting a few percent of that, but not fine if I
| pay "only" 10 euros when buying from them directly?
|
| No idea about the logic here. I'd also be fine to pay 15 or so,
| matching the physical book, bit of a premium not to have to
| enrich Amazon. But 35 as only alternative to 10? Yeah no.
|
| Edit: thought I should back this up with numbers. The first
| book that came to mind was Ready Player 2, I didn't cherry pick
| here it's literally the very first that I thought of and
| checked. Amazon ranked way higher than the official site but I
| got there via the author's Wikipedia page. From there there are
| links to three stores: one sells just the paper version, two
| stores both sell
|
| - The paper book for $13
|
| - The audio CDs for $44
|
| - It's available on Audible.de for EUR10
|
| This author (publisher?) is clearly not interested in getting
| sales via means other than Audible and must be happy with their
| EUR1.30 that the author says they get for non-exclusivity, or
| even if "audiblegate" is fake and they get the "full" 25%,
| that's still EUR2.50 instead of $44.
|
| It's the same with Steam. I don't play new games that often,
| but when I do, I look to buy directly from the authors, DRM-
| free, the whole jazz. Often it's simply not possible and the
| only purchase option is via Steam. Next thing I hear is my game
| dev friend complaining about Steam dominance. I'm trying, but
| they need to make it possible at all... (Or in audio books'
| case, make it somewhat reasonable)
| Tepix wrote:
| > _This author (publisher?) is clearly not interested in
| getting sales via means other than Audible_
|
| I guess the 40% instead of 25% (in reality: 21% and 13%) that
| Audible offers are the reason
| Aachen wrote:
| But they can't get the higher percentage because there is
| technically another sales avenue, so it's not exclusive,
| even if barely a soul would make use of it.
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