Why “OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems” Is Not in Amazon’s Kindle Store
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I bought physical copies of several of them (the “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” book, “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems”, “FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS” and “FreeBSD Mastery: Advanced ZFS”) on FreeBSD Mall.
I finished reading the “FreeBSD Mastery: Jails” book, and am currently reading the “FreeBSD Mastery: Specialty Filesystems” book.
I also recently bought the Total Mastery eBook bundle of his from his Tilted Windmill website. It includes eBook versions of the above books that I already have in physical copies, along with a bunch of other eBooks.
In the future I might buy physical copies of more of his books. There is something special about physical books that makes them far more comfortable to read for me than to read eBooks even though I have a eBook reader with eInk. The ability to flip through a physical book, and to feel the physical dimensions of the book adds something for me that eBook readers cannot.
I also want to investigate whether it is possible to donate books to some libraries. I think as a community we could buy IT books that we particularly like, and donate them to libraries, to make them available to more people. It would be especially nice to help books about FreeBSD and OpenBSD reach more people.
If you are familiar with other Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, and you would like to use FreeBSD, then I think the FreeBSD Mastery books that I mentioned which I have physical copies of are useful also.
If you are not familiar with Unix-like systems at all then the FreeBSD Mastery books are probably not yet so useful for you.
The FreeBSD Mastery books are the most useful to someone who is already using FreeBSD in my opinion.
Michael Lucas can delve into depths without making it sound too technical IMO. Sure, you can skip chapters too (ktrace in my case) and continue with the next one if it gets heavy.
His books can be read by newbies and seasoned pros alike.
Yes. They'll prepare you to switch over to FreeBSD. ;P
In all seriousness, the ZFS books would be helpful if you use ZFS on Linux. The FreeBSD-specific books probably not so much. Those are the only ones I've read.
I have worked through Httpd and Relayd Mastery as well and I am eyeing up SNMP Mastery, Ed Mastery (I expect Michael to make me laugh a good few times), and SSH Mastery after I am done with OpenBSD Mastery: Filesystems and (not by Michael though) The book of PF. Keeping Michael fed seems like a great way to bring more BSD knowledge out there and hopefully keep an alternative to the now so very corporate (and much larger) Linux sphere going.
"Let me be perfectly clear: ed is the standard Unix text editor. If you don't know ed, you're not a real sysadmin."
https://shop.aer.io/mwl/p/Ed_Mastery_The_Standard_Unix_Text_...
Gumroad/Leanpub give better rates too compared to Amazon. With services like Gumroad, it is also easy to build an email list and get in touch with your existing readers to promote new products, inform them of book updates, etc.
Also, I wonder if longer code snippets are still wrapped around or are they introducing horizontal scrollbars? (for those who read on Kindle devices, web/mobile app, etc)
I think at this point the difference between AZW and ePub is even mostly in the container format.
It would be interesting to find out if the lower price of part one increases sales enough to compensate for the lesser amount of sales of the latter parts, and if in the end the income is higher, lower, or about the same.
This is the real answer. The artificial scarcity business model is done. Patronage and crowdfunding are the only real ways for a creator to make money without having to sell copies.
(Not that I am a fan of Amazon's publishing model - it just seems they are tripping over an already solved problem.)
Maybe they figured that in the end they have a lot more cheap books than a few that might be more than double because of the non-progressive scale.
Larger authors are not compelled to agree to these terms sure, but if you’re a smaller publisher or author trying to get your work out there and noticed, it can be hard to gain ground without selling via Amazon.
OTOH, I published this book after about 7 years of weekly blogging, mostly about Emacs, so I think that everyone who might be interested in my book could easily know about it. And an intermediate Elisp textbook is rather a niche thing.
It's not as if Amazon is unaware, they'll fix their pricing system if enough people reject it.
Only thing that comes to mind is wanting to keep all ebook prices below $10, but that doesn't make much sense.
Btw, if author is around here, "About Me" -> "Support An Author" link is dead.
Not sure why you don’t think that makes sense? If they’ve done the research and figured out that’s how they sell the most books, it makes sense to push prices into that range
This ends up benefiting low-effort books because the ROI on them ends up higher than more complex projects that would require charging more per unit.
Selling books is a tricky business and Amazon is helping itself more than it is helping the ecosystem. If you can choose, go to a different vendor for books, preferably buy direct from the authors.
My own personal choice is first attempting to buy direct and my second option is Kobo which has a better royalty breakdown and is curated by real humans, as in as an author you can reach real people to talk at Kobo and help you out.
I try to make up for it with occasional donations which also seem like a nice feedback loop. It's astounding how well researched and packed with information some books are compared to others which I would also rate as good books.
For me (perhaps because I grew up with physical books) the perceived value of an e-book is much lower. The same way I would buy a daily newspaper on the way to work, but have never paid for a newspaper website. Or that I would routinely pay for a vinyl record album but have never paid for online music.
Something about the nature of electronic media reduces its perceived value compared to physical. Physical media I can hold. I can feel its weight. It is something real. There is a sense that I "own" it and that it cannot be taken away arbitrarily, or suddenly become unusable due to a technical fault or technological obsolesence.
I have an e-book reader but haven't bought any e-books over about $5.00. For anything asking $10 or more I still prefer physical copies.
TFA's linked Amazon resource page notes "UK Delivery Costs" are £0.10/MB (it's $0.15/MB in the U.S.), so if a Kindle book has 5 MB of images - not unreasonable for a nonfiction or technical book - that's $0.75 deducted from the royalty, regardless of whether book is priced $2.99 or $9.99.
The idea that Amazon is still charging a "delivery cost" for data as if it's a 2007-era Kindle running on a built in 3G connection is ludicrous. Almost all Kindles use Wi-Fi now. There is no real cost to delivering the ebook data; Amazon never retired the "delivery fee" because it's pure profit on the backs of authors and publishers.
Speaking of publishers: If an author is working through a publisher, the royalty cut will be eroded further. Is your publisher using a distributor for the physical copies, to get into bookstores? Distributors typically take a cut of ebook sales as well, even though they add no value for ebook delivery or placement on Amazon.
Finally, when Apple was lauded for cutting the rate charged to indie developers for app store sales from 30% to 15% in 2020, indie publishers asked for a similar break from Apple for titles sold in Apple Books (formerly iBooks):
"While applauding Apple’s decision to grant a bigger share of its revenue to independent software developers, the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA), representing more than 3,600 independent publishing companies nationwide, calls on the company to extend the same benefits to authors, publishers, and other small businesses using Apple Books for Authors and other ebook publishing programs."
Apple did nothing. The company still takes 30% for any book sold on its platform.
Source: https://www.ibpa-online.org/news/541675/IBPA-Calls-on-Apple-...
Text with a handful of images in it is literally the cheapest thing you can distribute over the Internet. It's the reason why self-hosting a blog or Mastodon instance is even financially viable for most tech-savvy people, and why you have a Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, WeChat, WhatsApp, LINE, Reddit, and Telegram for every YouTube.
Be careful though, too much thinking or acting on this subject might get you suicided by the FBI.
R.I.P. Aaron Shwartz
???
It's not charging the author for the cost incurred to the user, but for the cost incurred to Amazon. It doesn't matter if you have a 10 TBPS per second or are on your phone on edge, Amazon still has to serve the same amount of data to the customer.
$0.15 per MB is huge, I'm not going to deny that, but it's pretty clear it is also a measure to prevent abuse by the authors.
Print charges at Lightning Source have gone up considerably the past two years. In addition, they forced publishers to pay a minimum 30% wholesale discount this past year. Previously, I only paid 26% (most of which I am sure goes to Amazon or other online retailer). I try to keep the print cost to no more than 35% of the list, leaving me 35%. As bricks n mortar stores want a 50% discount at a minimum and also require acceptance of returns, I have never tried that route.
FreeBSD Jails*. OpenBSD does pledge/unveil in lieu of jails AFAIK.
I wonder how much of the ebook sales happen through the kindle store in the west. China and other places clearly have their own stores that seem to sell larger volumes.
It's somewhat interesting that you cannot really buy ebooks from amazon.co.jp outside the country either.
(I actually don't know if side-loaded KFX actually support notetaking on the Scribe)
At least then it doesn't require uploading to Amazon's servers.
So far, I haven't seen any evidence that the readers or apps will be getting native ePub capabilities.
Even then, ePubs sent to your own account still are treated as second-class books. Most importantly, they are not rendered in the "enhanced typesetting" engine, while Amazon-bought books (often likely from the same source ePub) do get that.
It's really hard to interpret this as anything other than making it intentionally hard/annoying to import DRM-free purchases from third-party bookstores.
You're supposed to be able to just tell platforms "no, take this down". That comes from DMCA 512, that thing that indie creators absolutely hate because its far more useful as a censorship tool than for copyright enforcement[1]. If someone else reuploads your book to Amazon you have to actually find that reupload, buy it to validate that it is your work, take it down (and dox yourself in the process), and then repeat, forever.
Outright infringement isn't the only scam either - ghostwriting and reselling lightly-edited GPT-3 copy[2] is also rampant on the platform, and there's even people selling courses on how to resell fake books[3]. This may eventually destroy Amazon's brand reputation, but it takes a long time to fall down the Trust Thermocline[4] when you're a giant like Amazon.
The $10 royalty punishment makes absolutely no sense to me and I do not understand what the hell Amazon's motive is there. Except perhaps to bluff-charge indie writers into devaluing their work ahead of time. It reminds me of how Apple pushed for $0.99 songs for so long that the RIAA was willing to go DRM-free just to be able to charge more for popular singles. Except Amazon is also really, really pro-DRM, and so is the rest of the traditional publishing industry, which is running the same grift Amazon is at a different stage of production.
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-availab...
https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audibl...
[1] If the particular indie creator in question is making fanart, then the latter feels like the former, even though the law sides against fan artists.
[2] Which is just infringement with extra steps, assuming that GPT-3 was trained on your original work and is regurgitating it
1. Screen is too small. And for everything except reading books "a large phone" is a bad. I've tried big phones. I don't like them. Other use cases either are best served with a phone-sized screen or a laptop.
2. E-ink. I could not imagine reading on non-e-ink. I'd rather buy the physical book, then, and that's a big ask. I'd really have to want to read this particular book.
3. No distractions. Notifications. "Just check my email real quick".
If you want to set up your own ebook store it's actually fairly straightforward, at least technically. You just need a normal e-commerce website that sells access to PDF or EPUB files.
The problem is that most people who buy ebooks do not want their collection split across multiple platforms. This is because each platform has their own DRM and app you have to read books in. If you get a new phone and need to redownload your collection, would you rather open up 200 websites to download each author's EPUBs or one app that keeps track of everything you bought?
Yes, I know you can work around this with cloud storage. But that's extra steps; and extra steps add friction and keep people from buying.
Furthermore, this all assumes you're willing to sell your book DRM-free. If you want DRM, or your publisher demands DRM, then you need to ship a mobile app instead of a website with downloads. And that poses a new problem: Apple and Google are not going to distribute your app unless you pay them the same royalties that you'd pay as an indie author on Apple Books or Google Play Books[0]. That's their moat. So if you're trying to create an indie publishing platform, you have to either charge two royalties and screw your authors, or make users jump through hoops to buy books on a website so it appears in an app.
DRM is in fact so much of a trap for authors and publishers that some platforms just outright refuse to distribute DRM-free books; Audible is the worst offender in this regard. Locked-down platforms also trap authors; in fact, the justification that Apple uses[1] for locking down the iPhone is that users can't pirate apps if they aren't savvy enough to get developer creds. Oh, and your special locked reader app is never going to work on Kindle e-readers, because they don't support apps period.
[0] I have no clue if Google even has a bookstore, I'm just assuming this is what it would be called.
[1] To developers, not to the general public, of course
I've heard about more than one author being told "Either exclusively (or by far the cheapest) on Amazon or no Amazon at all". That's a really shitty attitude and should be punished by customers.
But then there is also a bazillion other reason to avoid Amazon like the plague.
Fallback on ebooks.com.
I am in Europe. Not using Amazon.
One day I randomly looked up who owns it. Amazon subsidiary since 2011. Amazon is mentioned zero times on the homepage, zero times on the about page, zero times in Terms & Conditions, and once in a random help article.
So I've discovered I didn't go years without Amazon as I thought I did.
Some of my books are also available as ebooks, but I specifically avoid Amazon, because I dislike their DRM and their "cheap book" policy. $10 for a textbook? Come on.
It's more like 40 dollars, and that's assuming it's a very cheap place.
Many places in the world would allow you to have lunch for two for ~10 USD.
> It's more like 40 dollars, and that's assuming it's a very cheap place.
You have to realize that's not representative of every place in the world or even every place within the US, right? Prices around the world are vastly different.
Perhaps in Hong Kong dollars you'd spend $40 for lunch. I know some places use a dollar with much less purchasing power.
Also, on some Chinese Woks I could get a box of rice with chicken and some vegetables+addons such as onion rings for 12-13 euros. The box is pretty big so it can be split nicely without feeling yourself half-empty afterwards.
A few years back in Lisbon I got a simple main dish for 3€ in a restaurant. That was surprisingly cheap, I guess this is not possible in Spain, also not in the cheapest regions.
If you're claiming it's $40 for two for a "very cheap" place then you're clearly talking about a sit-down spot with full service and beverages and a 20% tip. But most people are not having lunch on a regular basis somewhere with a server who takes their order and brings their food and drinks. Food trucks and cafeterias exist for good reason.