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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.
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
I suppose it's the same codebase as any other country's amazon, and there's a different VAT rate in every country.
So it's unlikely their German prices would just take the same input as eg Dutch prices and changed the VAT around.
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 50€ 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
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.
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.
I get your point, but they probably gave a discount of 1-(1.16/1.19) =~ 2.5%
Probably also rounded down in favor for the customer but I can’t remember the details
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*lFhFi-5JsP-zhW7Al...
There is no excuse for this. None.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 :-)
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.
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).
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.
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.
> It's not exactly rocket-science either
I'd imagine that occasionally "rocket science" is exactly what it is!
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?
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).
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.
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.
Sounds like I lost the asshole measuring contest :)
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.
It takes sixty-five thousand errors before you are qualified to make a rocket.
-Wernher von BraunEven 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 André 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."
It is that rockets that can send payload into orbit are operating at the limits of what materials are capable of. You have extreme forces, pressures, temperatures, and some of the nastiest chemicals, all that while being as lightweight as possible. There is something called the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation. The equation is simple, but the implications are that space rockets are not like fireworks, and it is what makes rocket science rocket science.
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.
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.
If you were really honest about the meaning of the quote you should say "never assume malice" because that's the actual statement here.
I have another saying though: “Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”.
- Albert Einstein
Not talking specifically about this case, although it may apply, we just read a twitter thread.
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?
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.
That's pretty naïve way to see the world, especially in this day and age.
Reading the quote literally i disagree. There is miles of difference between "adequately explained" and "possible"
> That's pretty naïve 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.
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?
You would be better served not posting this kind of reply.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Kind of a major factor though.
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.
...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.
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.
> 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.
Sounds like easy profit from a captive audience.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Although if Amazon is always paying out some contractual minimum instead of the shared amount, then none of this makes a difference.
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.
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.
For the record, I also disagree with your blanket claim that supermarket discounts are negotiated ahead of time. Some are.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Credits with frequent 2-for-1 sales, £3 sales and £1 sales, there is just no reason to ever pay retail price on Audible.
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.
And you can put your spoken word content on eg Spotify or Youtube, too. There is competition.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
Wouldn’t this be a situation where they gave out promotional copies through free trials and stuff like that?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The terms are monopolistic, but I mean, they have a monopoly.
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.
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.
What is the potential gain of going after audible as an author?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
but then it goes on forever, right? (as long as copyright lasts)
(sure, the NPV probably still sucks due to time value of money)
“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
Some purchases are worth nothing (literally invoiced at a 0% royalty rate) to the authors/producers.
So, still sketchy, but for different reasons.
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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!?
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.
I wouldn't say quality products, lowest common denominator and all.
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.
Like, the author knows the policy if they decide to sell through Audible. It comes with a massive userbase, userbase which potentially exists because of a decent returns policy. If they think they can make more money on a platform which doesn't allow returns, then they are welcome to try - it's not like amazon has monopoly here, plenty of other places to buy and listen to audiobooks from.
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.
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.
https://help.audible.com/s/article/do-i-keep-my-credits-if-i...
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?
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.)
do they have some amazing team that comes up with these?
I prefer to keep things as they are.
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?
I'm not an audiobook person, but I know quite a few people who listen to them during their commutes.
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.
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.
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.
I can certainly understand during a commute (especially on public transport, or if most of your commute is a traffic jam) because the level of conscious attention required on the non-listening task is close to zero.
I admit to listening to music while doing other stuff - but I'm not focusing on the music. It's just a soundtrack - no need to remember plot lines, or make sure I don't miss critical story elements.
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).
Timestamp, book, price
Then author could simply calculate and verify royalties.
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.
This is a fantasy.
You do.
Stop using Amazon and related products. Tell everyone you can to stop using Amazon and related products.
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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!
Unfortunately I don't know how libraries work in the UK.
Is Amazon's 75% or 60% unfair, or is it highway robbery? Not to mention what they actually pay instead of the contractual amount.
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]
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.
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.
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
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
[Citation needed]
Offering <2-day shipping across every address in the US is very expensive. Amazon sellers can sell on Amazon without using FBA.
I'm not sure why you are so stuck on shipping costs. I was clearly talking about all the fees.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Always ask for a piece of the gross; the net is just fantasy.
The scandals that occupy the attention of the west far far overshadow the meager spying that took place during the watergate debacle.
I don’t feel like the twitter thread was detailed enough to be sure what is happening.
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.
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...
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 €10) 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 €10
This author (publisher?) is clearly not interested in getting sales via means other than Audible and must be happy with their €1.30 that the author says they get for non-exclusivity, or even if "audiblegate" is fake and they get the "full" 25%, that's still €2.50 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)
I guess the 40% instead of 25% (in reality: 21% and 13%) that Audible offers are the reason
> See what’s happening
> Join Twitter to get the full story with all the live commentary.
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.
...communicating...
via ...
multiple ...
twitter posts...
please...
... write an article, blog, book, youtube video
anything but these spread out posts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the first half or so, all they mention is that "returned" or "exchanged" books don't count, which seems reasonable.
This should be absolutely illegal.
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.