Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

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Right, but that was my point on the numbers. As a customer that has several hundred audio books due to Audible, yes, I know that the authors get a smaller cut of the sell than they do if I buy the audio book in a store. But their larger cut of my store purchases is effectively 0. Audible has grown the market to numbers that were basically pipe dreams of the past. To ignore that in the calculation is really dishonest.

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.

My problem isn't just with the royalty rates, it's making the default rate so low and using it as leverage to push authors into exclusivity contracts.

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.

But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?

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.

>But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?

Yes. Shitty practices from a market player with significant monopoly power are bad for all of them.

So you can show that authors are getting less money in this environment? And, despite me being able to trivially show that I paid less per book than any offered alternative on the table, with the exception of the library, you claim I'm getting a raw deal now? We can even add in performers and others doing the recording to this question.

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.

>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

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.

So you can't show that customers pay more, or that authors and performers get less? Got it.

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 has lots of competitors now, and exclusivity deals are everywhere, and product differentiators.

Netflix originals on netflix, HBO originals on max or whatever it's called now, marvel shows on Disney, etc

Yes. This is the modern anti-trust loophole. Same thing Google does with "our products are free so we can't be a monopoly".

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.

It is this odd debate on what companies "might do" that is so annoying to me. Don't paint what they are currently doing, today, as if they are already doing the future thing.

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.

>But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?

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.

Bias disclaimer: AWS is my current employer

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).

You're of course technically right, but I would argue that in practice Audible is also a gatekeeper due to their dominant and successful position (though of course to a lesser degree than Apple). I have family members and friends that will not even consider buying an audiobook if it's not on Audible. That's a testament to Audible's good work at making a good platform, and I believe Audible deserves to be in the position they are in. But, I do think they have effective gatekeeper status, and a lot of that is a result of their exclusivity practices. By ensuring that there can't be any other audiobook store out there that has all the books a person wants, and that you can't sideload a book into your Audible library that you purchased elsewhere, they force a high level of inconvenience on anybody who wants to buy a book somewhere else.

> Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does.

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...

² https://www.audiblegate.com/

> Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does.

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.

What books aren't available outside of the Kindle ecosystem?

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