Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
Its annoying, as I am against most DRM schemes out there. But to pretend those came from "big tech" is laughable, at best. A ridiculously large portion of "tech" is perfectly fine with sending copies everywhere. Is literally how many of us get our operating system. Music files and shareware copying were huge before the internet. Mod files and other demoscene music sharing was a ton of fun.
Specifically to audible, to complain about their margins without acknowledging that they have built a large part of the market feels dishonest. I remember audio books before audible. Usually ~50 bucks for book. As such, I owned maybe 1. So, congrats, the folks on them could get more of a percent of far far fewer purchases. Getting things for lower cost is exactly why I get more of them. Such that artists have gotten more from me, even with the lower margin to them, from audible than they ever got before. Wanting the same large cut of a smaller sell is entitlement on both ends.
I'm a big fan of the Libby app, which you can acccess through your local library. If your library subscribes to the service (and it's likely they do if you live in the USA), then you just need to log in with your library card. https://libbyapp.com
There's also LibriVox, which is mostly a volunteer project. As its volunteers, the quality of the reading can vary widely, but you can sometimes find audio versions of older literature here that can't be found anywhere else. It's also free.
I'm curious about how old you are. Tech's obsession with DRM (then called "copy protection") started in 1975¹, and IIRC as of the late 70s/early 80s basically all software of note had DRM.
Like the hardware had to be wired to the computer running the software. An extra hardware key that needs to be plugged into the computer as well doesn't do anything!
Make hardware keys that have the shape of real keys, and that you have to turn to engage the USB key.
The key shape isn't security, just a hint at what needs to plug where. You sell both keys and receptacles that can be put into a metal case or an otter box
Similarly, this is effectively what many car keys are, nowadays.
And yes, I remember serial port keys that tried to lock cad software. Some were keyed to physical sectors on hard drives.
It’s called iLok.
And anyone who works in the automotive industry, sadly.
And this is why DRM will never go away. Take DRM away, and creators will just stop releasing things digitally. Programmers in general need to learn to suck it up when it comes to things like this. Without DRM, pirates win, creators lose, legitimate audiences lose.
Is that guaranteed?
Album sales rarely made money for musicians; they made their money from live performances and merchandise. Plenty of musicians have released their music online as MP3s to drive folks to their concerts.
And long before DRM, we used to record things off the radio.
It's easier than ever to share music but instead people pay monthly subscription fees to streaming services.
Folks will pay for convenience. A lot of "piracy" was driven by an inability to get something _at all_ or only at an absurd price. And despite the protestations of the music and movie industries (both with long records of screwing over the artists), it's unlikely that "piracy" cause much financial loss.
That CD cost me $16. That’s $30 today. For an hour of music. Record label culture reeks of greed.
Before Napster they definitely did. The saying is that you used to tour to promote the album, now you make the album to promote the tour. Artists have always been last in line to get paid, but there was much, much more money in it before 2000.
That's why Good Old Games and CD Projekt RED is doing so incredibly well... because of it's robust DRM that's nearly impossible to break.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/18/business/technology-a-tal...
Which of course a lot of authors do because they need the money, and then no other audiobook marketplace can compete.
I don't know if they are the best numbers, but https://wordsrated.com/audiobook-sales-statistics/ has some break downs. The digital market has clearly seen a shift in the last couple of decades. And it seems safe to say that it has driven a lot of the growth in publishing and other related metrics.
My assertion is that publishers used to give higher cuts to the authors because they didn't care about such a small portion of their sales. More, their long term investments in printing made it such that they couldn't scale out audio books nearly as effectively, so they had no incentive to build out that market.
Even dumber in this debate, the fact that Audible puts their files in DRM is almost certainly at the demands of the publishers. You can click through most publishers to see they still want to charge 25+ for audio books that you can get for 1 "credit" on Audible. Credits being about 11 bucks, and I get why publishers would want to keep those files restricted to try and discourage people from using Audible.
Imagine if Apple started telling companies "You have to pay us a 60% cut, unless you agree to not have an Android app in which case we'll do 30% instead."
You could argue that Apple is entitled to make that arrangement because they essentially created the mobile app software market, but I have a hard time imagining that people would be OK with it.
I'm very sympathetic to all of these concerns, at large. However, as things are done, many authors will make the most money by agreeing to this contract, and customers get the cheapest option there. The only people actually getting hurt, right now, are the other platforms. To paint this in any other way is not at all honest. And that is the part that is annoying me.
There is also a moral hazard "they will switch some day" argument to be made, i suppose. But I don't like hinging current practices on future hypotheticals. Making a choice today should be possible with the understanding that you can make a different choice in the future.
Yes. Shitty practices from a market player with significant monopoly power are bad for all of them.
Obviously, I only have the numbers on what I paid out. If you actually have the others, I'm game to hear what those numbers are. And no, you can't just say, "they would have gotten a larger cut in the other marketplaces," as I am literally asserting that Audible is the largest marketplace because they grew it. A smaller cut of the much larger marketplace is the point. (And in real terms, the cut is smaller for Audible, too.)
It is funny looking at the benefit of libraries to customers, as guess who is also trying to kill library's ability to loan out audio books? (They already have to do some silly license purchase shenanigans.)
Again, if you are worried that they will "turn bad in the future," realize that I can change my mind in the future and agree they are bad. Right now, most evidence is that they are instrumental in growing the market.
Ma Bell was the largest telecom because they grew the industry. That doesn't mean their actions once they had monopoly power in a large market were particularly beneficial to anyone but themselves.
>Again, if you are worried that they will "turn bad in the future,"
No, they already did. Their actions now are bad. Exclusivity deals are bad. Their enormous cut is bad.
Appeals to "Ma Bell" are basically my point? If it is shown that they are using their advantages in audio books to compete in other markets, or that they are causing active harm to customers/creators, then I will be far more sympathetic to the whining of rich creators.
It is frustrating, as I mostly agree with the idea that exclusive deals are bad. But this is a very nuanced take where they aren't forcing you to be exclusive, unless they literally funded and produced it. (See Sandman on Audible. I'd expect that to be exclusive for at least a time?) If you can show coercion that they are forcing people into this deal, and not honestly saying "if you agree to this, you will sell about the same total amount, and get more of the cut," I will be more than willing to change my mind on that.
Netflix originals on netflix, HBO originals on max or whatever it's called now, marvel shows on Disney, etc
If every party wins then the only drawback is that the market evaporates and you end up with monoculture. Not a big deal unless the single player turns "bad" and starts abusing their position. Even if customers flee it would take a decade to regrow the free market.
And there's a huge buffer allowance for just being "a little bad". Like, "oops, sorry about that author/candidate that we crushed on accident, we've made a tweak to the algorithm and it won't happen again" but the damage is done.
I think a lot of people know that today it's a win-win but are just afraid what these companies _might_ do.
More, don't pretend like them doing something they are almost certainly legally bound to do because of the other big actors is their fault. Lobby to change rules, but realize that if you kill the newcomer to the market, you are likely setting up the old guard to take back over. And they are almost certainly going to do what they always do.
All of the above.
Don't take this as a slam, but given your responses in this thread, it's probably a good idea to get a primer about how anticompetitive practices work.
The meaningful difference between these two examples is that Apple is a gatekeeper to the iOS market.
Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does. Nobody can publish an app to the iOS App Store without going through Apple (and Apple doesn't allow alternative app stores or sideloading for consumers).
That's like saying anybody can sell iOS apps outside of App Store. Yes, it's technically true¹ (the best kind), but effectively there's no real alternative, and Amazon knows this and treats creators accordingly².
¹ https://buildfire.com/ios-app-distribution-without-app-store...
Sure, but audiobook publishers won't be there because of their exclusivity requirement with Audible, and they won't drop the exclusivity requirement because Audible has all the market share, and so the website never grows to compete.
Once Amazon figured this out with the Kindle and started pushing exclusivity there, books very quickly started disappearing from other online stores.
This isn't because Audible is head-and-shoulders above the competition either. They aren't. They just won the game of Monopoly[0].
[0] Someone should turn on house rules. Or - oooh maybe we could play the unused co-op mode
This is basically the same as the sad affair of enterprise software. The vast majority of that industry is actively bad. Not just not good, but actively bad.
Do you think the quality of the alternatives might be related to the fact that Amazon/Audible is strangling all competitors out of existence with their exclusivity agreements?
Imagine if an audiobook competitor popped up that's a 10x better experience for customers and authors. They'd starve out of existence without major VC backing because even though they're better, they can't bring the sales volume that Audible can, so customers choose the worse experience on Audible with the exclusivity agreement because the total earnings are higher.
Long-term, that's a worse ecosystem for everyone except for Audible.
This isn't even that controversial of a take. Netflix doesn't offer a ton of the things I used to be able to get in DVD from them, because the publishing houses have very high demands on licensing fees.
(Also disclaimer, I work at Amazon but not at audible)
Audible is literally locking away culture from the public and it's a god damned disgrace.
Disney famously has their "vault" that basically means you can only get physical copies when they deem it worthy to resell something. Relevant for libraries as they are bound by the same limitations, at that point.
On the other hand if you just want to listen to the book being read, check out https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts ... It does not sound as good as a pro human, but it's not far off in my opinion. I've used that to listen to 30+ books that I owned the digital version of.
Not the part that controls the market share.
For the DRM complaint, I'm mostly sympathetic, but I have a really hard time believing it is not at the insistence of the publishing companies. They literally force library lending to go through similar DRM schemes. And it is largely in their interests to make sure you can't purchase the cheaper Audible version of a book and take it out of their ecosystem.
That last point is ultimately my main gripe here. Audible has incentives for you to buy more from them. Which they largely pursue not by locking your current purchases to them, but by offering better prices and funding better books. To try and "stick it to the man" by bitching about DRM schemes is a hell of a non-sequitur that smacks more of virtue signalling than it does actual concerns.
Note that we aren't pushing for removing the DRM. This is largely about someone wanting you to buy from another place. I can almost believe the DRM angle, but publishing houses have shown they are the far larger driver of that than Audible is. This is why libraries have to have a special license to loan out audio books. They are largely looking to force that in ebooks, even.
As for the last point, that one is not about Audible, so... what are we even discussing here? The article last argument, which is after discussing DRM and monopolies where users are captured into a locked market, is that google and apple has a 30% tax. They don't go into any depth over why a general 30% tax in a third-party market is bad in a duopoly situation, presumably because they don't feel it is necessary.
What do you mean the point wasn't on Audible, btw? The article is literally about how he is proud he isn't putting his book with Audible because of DRM? This is painted as if it is a choice of Amazon's, but it is hard not to read this as a choice of the Doctorow's. Perhaps you thought I was referencing someone else's last point? I meant that as a reference to my last point in the previous paragraph.
And, at large, I don't care for either of those things. I agree that DRM blows. I also would love it if writers and narrators and SFX crews and everyone got more money. I have grown to not trust a lot of the "big tech company is root of all problems in this old rotting industry" story.
> If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.)
> Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of reference, most brick-and-mortar stores take around 50% on a retail product. Audible pays indie authors less than a bookstore does, when a bookstore has storefronts, sales staff, and warehousing to deal with.
> I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter. But I didn’t know HOW bad. Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money.
What's worse is if the audio book goes into their subscription service, the author gets paid an even smaller fraction, as it is 25% or 40% of the fractional time on the subscription fee.
Amazon built the system to dominate the market, then used the dominant position to bully creators into a teeny tiny fraction of the profits Amazon makes on the work.
[1] https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022...
The odd complaint here is that the authors are upset at getting a smaller share of a smaller sell, that is in a much larger sea of sales. They acknowledge that they make more money from audio books sold at audible, even with this cut.
This also does a shit job of showing the break down to the performers that are reading the book. If those are paid externally to the 40% that goes to the author, I really don't know how to take the complaints seriously other than greed on the authors that are talking about it.
Amazon originally paid out 70% like most other digital goods purveyors. Once they cornered the market they arbitrarily pushed it down to 25% (you only get 40% if you agree not to sell anywhere else). This means that for many authors, especially indie authors, they lose money publishing the audio version of their book.
I will also ack that I'm all for better legislation to help creators in a lot of this. I just don't know that this all is as clean a picture as you are making it. For an easy example, did audible drop their payout from 70 down to 20ish at the same time they dropped the average price that they sold at? That would change the story more than a little bit, if so. Do they also cover some of the upfront costs of production for some audio books?
JAQing off in defense of a monopolist is a bad look.
That said, please educate me on where I'm giving a clear lack of understanding on how it works. I'm basically seeing a couple big name authors that are effectively telling me I'm a bad person for buying audio books from Audible. But, far as I can see, every alternative is complete utter shite. Except the library, from which I still gladly get audio books on CD.
And again, there is no evidence that audible is lessoning consumer choice? There is some evidence that they lesson producer practical choice. But even that is weak? With few exceptions, mostly audible produced works, I can find all of the books I care about elsewhere.
You can call that whatever you want, but it sounds a lot like the descent to pre-Internet situations that weren't markers of stable quality and that many people who survived the 1980s don't want to see again.
They have 90% of the audio book market, likely. They do not have exclusives on that much, though. I'd hazard that 90% of the available book market is through the major publishers, still. At large, this makes sense, as most books are still written with upfront payments from publishers.
I would also not really shed much of a tear for Audible. I just don't understand the idea that getting rid of them moves us further from the old style. Seems more likely that the publishers would brow beat any future entry into the market so that it was much closer to how things were in the 80s and 90s.
My understanding is that is not how this works. The author pays the voice actor, or the publisher does. Amazon is paying for hosting an audio file, basically, and the development of the player app, and that's it.
I think in the very early days, Amazon may have paid all the voice actors itself (because no one was on board with audio yet at that point), and the 40% royalty model may have made sense. But I believe that is not how it works now, and 40% royalties make a lot less sense in the world we now live in; it seems to be just purely predatory.
I just know that, even today, the audio books I purchase are far cheaper if I get them from Audible than basically anywhere else. Unless it is a book on CD I get from the library, for obviously different reasons.
I also know that things are byzantine to get an audio book from a library. Largely due to the influence of publishers, not tech companies.
We also still have more than a few books on CD. We don't get as many as we used to, ironically, since it is far more convenient to use audible. Nice to shift from car to bedroom for stories.
I've been curious on why more "music players" weren't better at audio books. I'm guessing the ability to save mid track is just not nearly as big of a deal for most music applications?
Many car CD-players handled it just fine.
But my understanding is that the large publishers mostly do this themselves (and therefore have to pay the voice actor out of the 40% cut they get). Similarly, independent authors won't get access to this level of service; in some cases they're literally reading the book themselves, but they still only get the 40% cut (and that's with exclusivity).
The reason why audiobooks are cheaper is due to the subscription model. That's the chief innovation that Amazon pioneered with Audible. Now, their clout certainly also had something to do with it, and the burgeoning Kindle ecosystem. But the issue of price is really a matter of subscriptions being stickier and keeping customers in the ecosystem longer, making it possible to make aggregate more money. It's the same business model as Netflix, Dropbox, Adobe CC, etc.
That is, the new advances in audio recording and digital distribution led to a vastly superior marginal cost environment that didn't exist back in the 80s/90s. Publishers decided not to lean in on that, and by the time Audible had demonstrated that it was a viable market, it was too late for them to squeeze them on license costs.
I admit this sounds almost conspiratorial, but they literally colluded to try and force higher prices on ebooks. Such that I don't find this that beyond the pale.
> Amazon is paying for hosting an audio file, basically, and the development of the player app, and that's it.
"development of the player app" is kind of load-bearing in that sentence:
They host a directory of books and provide recommendations (which amounts to lead-gen, probably (?) increasing the number of copies of your book that sell because users stumble upon it either by browsing or by searching for keywords).
They take payments (not a high bar, but that's 1-3% if you wanted to do it "yourself", not to mention the cost of either integrating with a payment provider yourself or paying somebody to do it, so it shouldn't be forgotten about).
Finally, their model where you pay a subscription that gets you a credit per month or whatever leads to even more book sales. I hate this model and I finally ejected myself from the Audible ecosystem, but before I did I spent a bunch of credits that I had saved up.
That doesn't make the complaint less relevant, though. The complaint is the explanation for why they're doing so.
> They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon's monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.
While it's true that your purchases are tied to your Amazon account, they are not tied to your audible subscription (if you have one). That's a nice touch.
Even better, the DRM is trivially easy to remove. Audible already allows you to download the files you bought and ffmpeg has the `-activation_bytes` flag which will pop the DRM right off. There are sites like https://github.com/audible-tools/audible-tools.github.io to help you find your account's bytes (which you only need to do once; they don't change). Not ideal, but not as bad as it seems.
All that said, support alternative audiobook sources when you can, like https://libro.fm and your local library!
Definitely a good reason to back up any audible purchases sooner rather than later (as as soon as you buy any future ones!)
After being introduced, he goes on an 8-minute disquisition. We should all aspire to rap tech like Cory Doctorow can.
Big tech companies must pay the bills for their servers in one way or another and charging people money to keep the data in their digital vaults is a tradeoff most consumers and producers are more than happy with. Consider the alternative to this. It would require every creative to manage their own payment gateway and digital delivery infrastructure and they would more than likely end up either even or in the negative as far as their own profits were concerned.
Maybe Doctorow has a big enough audience to manage his own digital delivery infrastructure but most authors I'm certain don't have the same luxury.
If there was a competitive ecosystem of client software and hardware and also online stores and it all interoperated, we would have a lot more choice, control of our purchased media and devices, and lower prices too.
So if the data centers and protocols are not the problem it must be consumer preferences and going by the software quality that most consumers are willing to put up with I am certain they don't know and care enough about interoperability to actually force the big players to develop the necessary interoperability protocols.
You're ignoring the elephant in the room, which is anti-trust is dead, and the tech companies running the show are too damn big. If you start a competitor to audible, it can use its leverage with both AWS and Amazon and squeeze you until you're dead, and then continue on with its monopoly.
It's in the OP and in my post: "anticompetitive DRM lock-in". Lack of interoperability.
I kinda don't get audiobooks myself, I find it hard to concentrate on the book and often have to pause and go back and re-listen because I zoned out.
I guess this is semi-offtopic but I like Doctorow and he can have a slice of my money.
I haven't been on Kickstarter for years. I felt kinda odd to buy an already-written book there ("your reward may not happen" warnings when I'm clearly just buying a book rather than backing a project). But I see a lot of "projects" are basically pre-sales there. Where do people go for genuine crowd-funding of bluesky projects?
As someone who also loves to "surf" the web and who misses the good old days, I do wonder if it's really in humanity's best interests to have everyone starting at screens all day. There was a time before the web when we thought computers would do all the grunt work, but the last few decades seem like we humans are still needed to push buttons, Copy/Paste, etc. for everything.
My comment yesterday on Mastodon:
@pluralistic I just listened to the 8 minute audio teaser, signed up for libro.fm, and joined your kickstarter. I feel like I am trapped in Apple’s walled garden, but I am at least looking for a window to open!
"What's more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality."
Cory ignores that we only need Right to Repair laws because GOVERNMENTS made it a crime in the first place! So color me skeptical that governments are going to "fix" the mess they created.
Most of the other problems are simply that most people value things differently than he does: most people are happy with sandboxes from Apple, Facebook, Google, etc., and are not interested in free software, interoperability, etc.
We can't improve that with government intervention and we shouldn't try -- look at how they helped with DRM.
It's a touch ironic but nevertheless predictable, an old problem wrapped us as a new one, making me wonder: why the book will be all that interesting?
Large publishers have forced DRM and squeezed authors in other media markets such as music or TV and film, protecting their monopolies on distribution and consequent power to market-make. What is new?
He's constantly giving away his books. One theory is that he makes much more from "consulting" and political work around Silicon Valley. So the books are just loss leaders.
Wake me when September ends.
Or do you think the author should use some form of DRM to control what people do with their book?
Also you're missing how Kickstarter works. The fundraising goal is not a ceiling, it's a floor.
Second, I'm not sure CD is anti-copyright.
Third, you're not in a position to say what he's all right with unless he's said he's specifically all right with that.
I'm not trying to convince you to pay the author, but your rationale is lacking.
Unfortunately BoingBoing has slowly become enshittified itself; they also deleted my account for no reason while I was hospitalized for nearly 2 months, then when I came back home noticed that the ad-rticles where they sell overpriced low quality products (seriously, get better suppliers!) don't permit user comments anymore, presumably because some inevitably pointed to better and cheaper products. I recall thinking "ok, they went the IMDB way". IMDB once had a very active user comments sections, but when fake movie ratings, mostly by shills, became a thing, users started to expose them in comments, so what was IMDB response? Remove user comments, naturally.
They've become the annoying religious proselytizers who show up unsolicited, and are drunk to boot.
Not gonna lie, that annoyed me.
But I've got to admit I stopped reading BoingBoing a couple of years ago.
On various feeds:
https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_447
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-internet-con-how-t...
https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/podcast-cory-doctorows-cr...
https://play.pocketcasts.com/podcasts/88849f30-39ce-012e-11b...
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-comput...
It doesn't become DRM just because some people choose not to make a backup copy. That would be like saying everything I can see with my eyes but choose not to photograph has DRM on it (or effectively is DRM). That's clearly not true, as I could at any time decide to photograph my surroundings and the objects I'm photographing aren't going to restrict my camera.
Why? It seems like a good description that accurately describes the behavior and is reasonably obvious on first reading.
I can't see how enshittification is any different. Enshittify, like corrupt needs to have a definition at some point.
About including the essence of meaning into the word, I would propose 'entrapment'. But "enshittification" seems to be a special choice for conveying derogation and evoking attention to the discussion - so called dysphemistic and emphatic swearing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity#Types), and this goal might be more important for the author than that of making the word's meaning obvious from word itself. If 'enshittification' catches on, it will be able to be considered as worthy of attention anyway, and one won't need to use word's lexical clarity to judge its importance.
There's a difference between DRM and using copyright law to the fullest.
Thinking the line is between loading your stuff with user-hostile malware and giving it away is precisely the kind of thing the user-hostile malware camp would want people to believe: "We have to spy on users and destroy their machines because the alternative is not compensating artists! We stand with SAG-AFTRA so install Denuvo on every system you own!"
This is "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere) as explained in [1]:
> The "pluralistic" in my Pluralistic strategy is twofold. First, I practice "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere). That is, while my posts appear as threads on Twitter and Mastodon, and as articles on Medium and Tumblr, the permalinks for each post live on my own site, which I control.
I thought you were talking about this [2] but there is a very good reason that he explains here [3] or by listening to the audiobook (which can also be heard here on his podcast [4]).
[1]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5RWTPR7/
[3]: https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-...
[4]: https://ia801507.us.archive.org/18/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podca...
It's not similar to buying a physical version of your movie on a DVD, and owning it. This has huge ramifications. People spending 1000's of $ on sites cannot own them, nor even transfer them (sell) to another account. Which is why physical copies are still attractive to own.
There's also issues of buying something that entirely disappears. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnarcher/2018/09/17/apple-res...
This is a lie. Further, it is a lie designed to outrage the reader and drive engagement. It is enshittification. "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster." Saying Amazon won't carry your book is like saying the App Store won't carry your app...because you refuse to participate in a walled-garden software ecosystem.