Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing is a dystopian nightmare

Canceled my prime subscription about a year back. Amazon's response to low quality garbage filling their platforms has, humorously, been to erect walls and opaque processes that in the long run benefit the people selling low-quality garbage.

How does that work? Well, if you are a pop-up reseller of some Alibaba good, you simply accept eventual account terminations, and you roll that into your deployment process. The lifecycle looks like this:

1. You make some new generic name like FITPLUS

2. Order several hundred items from a factory whose representative you can contact by barking up the chain on AliExpress, the factory should be able to white-label them as FITPLUS for a small fee.

3. You pay for a couple dozen reviews up front on your new account to seed reviews.

4. Just keep shipping, and if the product is reviewing well, keep shipping forever. If not, restart the process.

5. Report other market players for similar items as making derivative products. After all, they are probably doing the same to you.

The key thing for success is that you treat Amazon and your customers with a complete mercenary mentality. Your name doesn't matter, service doesn't matter, because everything that happens is at the whims of fickle machine gods. If your first offering doesn't work, you fire up a second, a third, a fourth, until something sticks around for a while.

People trying to make high-quality goods will typically roll over and bow out after the first product take-down.

Yep we were also banned from Amazon for no good reason with our book https://juliadatascience.io.

Guess what. I’ll jump through whatever hoops I need to just to AVOID Amazon. Well done Amazon.

what was this "no good" reason you were banned for?

Probably never disclosed

Could also be a "missing missing reason"

Things like this are why I purchased some ISBNs and self-publish/distribute.

The books (e.g.:Data Analysis with Rust Notebooks[1] and Practical Evolutionary Algorithms[2]) are doing well, and whilst I'm likely "leaving money on the table", I'm happy with how it's going.

[1] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/data-analysis-with-rust-...

[2] https://datacrayon.com/shop/product/practical-evolutionary-a...

I'm not familiar but curious: If you entirely self-publish, is there a benefit to having an ISBN number over... Just publishing w/o one? Or is there a legal requirement to do so?

It was often brought up in conversations with universities and their libraries - having them made things more convenient. The books were selling for a year or so without ISBNs, no problems either way!

My understanding is that libraries prefer to use other identifiers than ISBN like the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Congress_Control_Nu...

and

https://www.oclc.org/bibformats/en/fixedfield/oclc.html

ISBN is intended for the marketing of new books and publishers are allowed to reuse the ISBN if a book goes out of print.

I used to work at the library at my Uni and did some analysis of what we had in our catalog and found quite a few books that shared the same ISBN from South End Press which I thought was funny because I had a friend who grew up next door to Noam Chomsky and was friends with the people who ran South End Press. We were talking with them about web publishing in the the early 1990s and found the people there were really excited about something called Futuresplash which eventually became Macromedia Flash.

I think they didn't want to pay for new batches of ISBN numbers and maybe it was colored with a desire to "stick it to the man".

Also at home in my collection I have a lot of books that are from the 1950s and 1960s which have an LCCN but don't have an ISBN so the ISBN would not be a good primary key for a personal book database though I think the LCCN would be better.

Books not published in the US often don't have a LCCN, so not great as a unique ID.

Also if you're actually building a database, never use a meaningful data element like ISBN or LCCN as the primary key. What happens if you have multiple copies, for example?

That's a good point. I should probably print a QR code that is equivalent to a type 4 UUID or a snowflake id and stick it on each individual book. Now that I think of it, I have two copies of Nixon Agonistes which I mentioned in a comment here yesterday.

ISBN's provide a way for people - including bookstores and libraries to index your book data. Which means if you use Ingram Spark, or Amazon's extended distribution, or any other major distributor, your book will pop up on huge amounts of other bookstores inventory systems pretty much automatically.

It won't mean a lot for sales unless you also encourage places (stores, libraries) to stock them, but it does have a small effect (caveat: self-published authors are seen as less than dirt by a lot of bookstores, as a subset of self-published authors takes the "encourage places" as "relentlessly badger places" to try to get them to stock unsellable books)

I've had a handful of sales that way, and financially it's been irrelevant, but it is a little boost to see my books pop up more places.

I have friends who self-publish to KDP, and it seems that around 103% of indie authors hate KDP. Obviously, Amazon has reach, vertical integration blah blah blah, but still, feels like someone could build a KDP competitor relatively quickly and win out without even going full compassionate-platform (although obviously that would be better). Just, like, 20% less Kim Jong Bezos? Please?

>build a KDP competitor relatively quickly

Build? Yes. Establish as such? Almost certainly not. At least not without someone big pushing it hard. So even if something like that ever comes to light, it will be the spawn of another corporate overlord who only seeks to screw over customers in the long term as soon as they get a hold on them.

There are a few ebook stores, aren’t there? I’ve encountered some fiction on Smashwords, 'munificent sells Crafting Interpreters on Payhip, and I’m sure those are not the only options I’ve seen.

Yea there are some genre specific storefronts for self publishing. They do ok, I think. No "unlimited" offering (see my comment above) and usually fairly small catalogs because of their choice to stick to one genre

There are many places that sell ebooks. Including Google, Apple, and Barnes and Noble.

None of them have managed to make much of a dent in KDP.

Do any of those have an "unlimited" monthly subscription? Honest question, I don't know. Not sure that's the magic ingredient but based on conversations with my friends it's a factor.

No idea. Kindle Unlimited is however a large part in creating this problem. When you enroll your books, you need to agree to make that e-book exclusive to Amazon. Especially for less known authors (like me) it's tempting - it's satisfying to see the page reads stack up instead of waiting for the much rarer purchases. The money might not be that different, but when the amounts are small any kind of signal like that becomes a disproportionate reward.

I finally took my novels off it because the money is a small enough factor to me that I'd rather avoid contributing - however little - to entrenching Amazons position.

The biggest problem a KDP competitor would have to deal with is that a lot of advice to aspiring selfpub authors is to just focus on KDP and ignore everyone else, because even e.g. Google Play Books and Apple Books produce rounding errors of revenue for most writers.

If you're going to compete in that space, I'd say if you manage to compete with e.g. Webnovel you might stand a better shot, because the non-Chinese owned competitors to Webnovel all appear to be DOA (but you might want to ask yourself why that is, and why Webnovel works, and consider that Webnovel is wildly writer-hostile, using exclusive contracts and encouraging brutal publication schedules)

> the non-Chinese owned competitors to Webnovel all appear to be DOA (but you might want to ask yourself why that is, and why Webnovel works, and consider that Webnovel is wildly writer-hostile, using exclusive contracts and encouraging brutal publication schedules)

I feel like the brutal publishing schedules are part of why they work, unfortunately. I'm not a regular consumer of Webnovel, so I'm curious what your take on what makes them successful is?

I agree, and it makes it far harder to get it to work in places where you'd need to offer substantially more for that to be attractive. My son reads a lot there, and expect hundreds of chapters to bother starting a series, and gets annoyed if there isn't a new one every day.

Meanwhile most authors of fiction write 3 novels or less in a lifetime... Though I guess at least in part because most get disillusioned once they don't get readers.

I understand the frustration and the anger of authors, and not using KDP may be indeed the sane thing to do for an author. But it appears that the root of these dystopic situations was not an evil overlord, but people trying to use KDP as a SaaS (Scam as a Service) platform [1].

We can still blame Amazon for only catering to the consumer side and effectively ignoring the authors' side.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/amazon-tries...

Let's give AI-powered scammers some credit too https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/amazon-restric...

I can blame the evil overloads for building a monopoly which then becomes a juicy target for scammers. Just like block chains are effectively "the mother of all zero-day bug-bounties", so are monopolies the mother of all algorithm-exploitation bug-bounties.

When companies can't tell you what they believe you did wrong, and point to a vague list of things it could have been, they fail.

So, when Google and Amazon will fail?

Google will fall very slowly as it gradually degrades in public image and engineering quality. It weathers the oncoming storm better than most others simply because it did not invest heavily in cloud as a product and source of revenue. Instead it's mostly a way to make marginal dollars to offset some of the upfront and operating costs of infrastructure it already had and needed to continue to build. Amazon will probably go much quicker as they primarily make their money from providing cloud services, subsidizing their delivery network and storefront with money made from the high margin cloud products. Microsoft is similarly betting very hard on cloud and AI, moving its bread and butter business services (ActiveDirectory, Office Suite, Windows) to subscription model SaaS products while spending billions on AI infrastructure and integrations. When the AI bubble pops, it takes most of the Fortune 500 (primarily in the Fortune 10) with it. VC investment dollars for fast growth startups dry up as portfolios prefer more conservative, stable growth businesses. Consumer spending nosedives, primarily effecting Amazon as the razor thin margins of its delivery network start getting eaten into by less volume without reduction in op-ex. It increases margin on cloud products to compensate. Nvidia retains a sizable chunk of its AI driven valuation. Microsoft, who bet hard on cloud and AI hurts, badly. They dramatically raise prices, starting with their government cloud customers, but public cloud quickly follows suit. Businesses look to alternatives, shifting towards owning their own "private clouds". Oxide computing is eating good. Oracle, who has been building data centers for AI workloads, suddenly has excess of capacity freed up by the drop in investment for AI. They either invest in their own low-margin, primarily self managed cloud infrastructure or go all in on being the American Hetzner, selling U-s and racks populated with (by this point) last generation hardware that businesses are moving towards as their IT op-ex budgets get slashed and are forced to cut costs by decreasing infrastructure spend at the cost of reduced quality and shouldering the risk of failed hardware and poor security posture. SysAdmin and DevOps roles start focusing more heavily on fundamentals instead only particular IaaS platforms and APIs, similar for dev roles. Meanwhile, Microsoft is on the brink of collapse. It sells off its Office suite to Intuit, Xbox turns into a certification platform for PC-prefabs and gets sold to Tencent. Windows continues to exist, but struggles as the new generation entering the workforce primarily uses browsers and chromebooks and businesses shift harder towards Linux and ChromeOS as the workstation OSes of choice because of costs and ease of management using free, self-managed platforms or small up and coming competitors to ActiveDirectory.

Amazon and Google struggle but survive. Microsoft gets broken up and follows in IBMs footsteps and fades out of relevance.

They fail operationally at serving the customer in those cases. But if the % of that happens is low enough, then strategically it doesn't affect them.

You're swimming in the same ocean as hundreds of thousands of people who are following scammy "earn passive income from home" guides that tell them how to self-publish garbage books and audio books on platforms like Amazon. You got caught in the same dragnet. It sucks, but it is what it is.

Just recently there was a person here proudly showing off how they created 70,000 audio books with AI.

You probably spent months or even years hand-crafting your book. That's not even remotely comparable, but looks identical to a robot. No human is going to read you book or even flip through the first few pages when they're inundated by literally hundreds of thousands of submissions a month, 99% of which is auto-generated junk.

AI is evil. Not in some distant future, but here and now.

It's only a tool. Moral judgement should be reserved for human actions and decisions around its use in a particular case.

We threw the brains of every artist and author into a blender, then squeezed the condensed puree into the Intertubes.

Yes, it's a tool, but it's a dystopian[1] one.

See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UShsgCOzER4

[1] The spell checker in my browser refuses to acknowledge the existence of this word and is underlining it in red, gaslighting me into believing that there is no such thing. Oh, gaslighting is underlined too. These are bad thoughts. Stop saying and writing these things, human! Do not question! Consume. Conform. Obey.

I am curious what browser / os are you using.

Firefox Developer Edition

This LLM was forged deep in the mines of reddit, scalded in the waters of 4chan. It's embued with the souls of a billion YouTube video transcripts. It is a dishonored weapon. Use it well, for it comes from blood.

The problem seems to be that there a lot of aligned incentives to turn the humans into rubber stamps for the AI's decision.

The FTC should collect stories like this if they ever want to build a monopoly case.

Maybe the whole "tech"/software model is inherently broken. Yes you have minimal margin costs, but that also means there is no oversight... Everything is automated and there is no escalation paths or effective humans in the loop... So if anything fails it stays failed...

Welcome to the life of powerless serfdom on digital marketplaces. Similar things can easily happen to you on the app stores, ad sales accounts etc.

When people depend on these platforms for their livelihood and they have no real competitors there has to be some transparency and due process. Regulation is the only way.

Now imagine people want to replace developers with AI, not only we won’t have control over those problems but even worse the code behind it as well if no one reads back millions of lines of code to identify problems in rules (which already seems to be the case here). What a nightmare

Agreed - but on the other hand (no flippancy intended) it's not hard to imagine AI would have done a better job in this instance.

You have a point, the problem is that AI might be better in some instances but in other instances for example insurance, banking, medical, in more critical cases, having an opaque system with wrong and rigid rules is worst than a nightmare. But everyone will jump on the bandwagon, not only the less problematic cases (I thing we agree that not buying a book might be considered less important than not receiving medical care) but everyone. In somes instances if AI does a worst job the consequences on human life might be terrible

> ... the problem is that AI might be better in some instances ...

It's not good for anything. Every time you spot how useless it is for a specific task, the AI fans say you are using it wrong and for the wrong purpose, and please give it more data and time to get better. It's garbage and the VC money is running out. It'll become a forgotten acronym soon.

Please give it more time. It will get better.

I'd wager they are using AI to ban books, so no, AI will not do a better job.

Assuming you're in the right, your only hope is to go viral on social media. This post is a good start. More and more companies at scale have given up on customer service unless you can get enough eyeballs on the issue.

Weirdly, after getting a lot of replies and upvotes, this post seems to be completely buried now.

Just wanted to chime in here and say that I, too, got banned from KDP, but in a rather sinister way. They initially locked me out of my account totally, only for access to be reinstated after an email to them. I thought, phew, that was lucky! Little did I know I was still banned…

What I hadn’t realised until releasing my next novel was that whilst I was free to publish work to the platform—and free to run and pay for ads—I wasn’t actually able to collect my royalties! It took me a while to realise this as there’s quite a lag between sales and payout. I was livid. After many emails I’m still not able to collect unpaid royalties on the new novel.

I wonder whether contacting a regulator or a lawyer is better.

Maybe a regulator gives you more anti-retaliation protection.

It was suggested that I could take them to small claims, but I've never done anything like that before, and looking into it seems that Amazon makes it rather hard and admin heavy to do.

I've basically written off KDP for all future publications, and most of my current stuff is for sale through all the other book retailers.

It's a real shame as Amazon is the heart of a lot of indie publishing and provides a good service but ultimately they don’t care about the individual.

I have seen stories of slightly bigger indie authors also raising hell on Twitter and getting various other people involved (BSFA in this case) to speak to Amazon. In that case I believe they got paid.

I’m still shocked that Amazon let me pay for ads for a novel that I would never get the sales money for. That hurt more than just being delisted.

If you took them to small claims court, my concern is that they might do something like ban you from future publishing on Amazon/Kindle -- either because you've become a nuisance, or as a warning to other authors.

(Which could be bad for you, considering they're a gatekeeper to your access to much of the market.)

My thinking is that a regulator could offer some protection against retaliation, because that's a basic part of regulation, when you have people reporting.

Or a lawyer might be able to figure out how to protect you. Which might involve doing particular things, a particular way, at particular times.

Small claims are easy.

I am not sure how good is the anti-retaliation protection.

That sucks. My advice as a content creator is to never put too much weight into one platform. When you write books, try KDP, try traditional publishers, try selling direct on a website. When you make videos, use YouTube but also try making a course on Udemy and do direct tutoring. Sign up for Substack and Patreon. Spread it out, fight it when you can, and move on when you can't. Some people have had this sort of thing happen with their YouTube also.

Reminds me of Dr. Disrespect getting his insanely popular Twitch account banned all of a sudden. Hard days when the thing you've been trying to grow meticulously for years goes poof overnight for no clear reason and no clear path to appeal.

I mean, if I've understood the story correctly, there was a very clear reason

It seems this was made public only very recently, my bad.

> On June 25, 2024, Dr Disrespect confirmed that the reason for his Twitch ban was a result of him sending DMs to a minor through Twitch whispers, and that the ban served in 2020 was a result of those actions.

The problem is KDP is the 500 pound Gorilla for self pub, and traditional publishers only publish a vanishingly small proportion of works. If you want to make a career out of it, sure try trad first. You're almost certainly not going to make it. If it's a hobby, or you don't get through the needle at a trad publisher, you leave the majority of income on the table if you get locked out of KDP unless you're in a niche and already have direct access to a large portion of your readers.

E.g. if you're writing tech books about an OSS project you're at the core of, you can probably do fine without KDP.

If you write fiction, being without KDP will make things 10x as difficult.

This does not mean I disagree with you. In principle you're right. Just pointing out that in the general case KDP is such a big factor for writers that for most it will habe a lot of weight.

There's a reason they get away with KDP Select (exclusivity for Amazon) to include you in Kindle Unlimited, for example: It takes very little KU income to outweigh all other e-book sales channels for a lot of self published authors.

I've just removed my two novels from it, not because I think I'll earn more that way, because I don't, but because I agree it's worth diversifying - in my case more because I've decided I earn little enough from it that I can afford to make it more about principle and maybe contributing in some tiny way to reducing Amazons dominance.

I sell through KDP and this is a good heads up. Sorry it happened to you; when it eventually happens to me I'll bail to Lulu and never look back.

Does anybody have experience with using a service similar to Lulu in Germany/EU?

https://indie-autoren-buecher.de/selfpublishing-blog/buch-ve...

here’s a German article discussing KDP alternative, maybe that’s of help to you.

Thanks!

Doing KDP and FBA for books - FBA is even worse.

Many books have invalid/duplicate ISBN.

Amazon have problem keeping track of them. Smaller book store usually can handle without problem.

This has been going on for years. My own book got banned and there was no recourse. Are there any alternatives to KDP?

Try an alternative platform, and boost their presence/market share in the process:

https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/p/writinglife

(For example)

Its almost like a world run by robots is inhumane and dystopian.

I've been a publisher on KDP for more than 10 years. Automated lockouts and unresolvable technical issues are the norm for Amazon's seller and publisher tech.

* Features are rolled out quickly. They are often in a half-baked state, or are implemented with a poor understanding of the needs of authors and suppliers.

* Edge cases are numerous and handled poorly.

* Because the barriers to entry are so low, KDP and Seller Central are magnets for passive income hustles that exploit technical or policy loopholes. For instance, the KENP scam started out about 10 years ago, using internal links to fool Amazon into thinking a book had been read in its entirety to maximize KDP Select payouts. It has since evolved to leverage AI-generated content and click farms (https://nicholasrossis.me/2023/08/23/understanding-the-kenp-...).

* New policies and technical fixes designed to head off the scammers lead to false positives and automated lockouts. For instance, good luck if some algorithm thinks you're posting fake reviews.

* Automated support is deeply flawed, and very frustrating to deal with, as TFA describes.

* Human support can't keep up with the sheer number of cases and situations.

* Amazon is very siloed. I've heard that teams are encouraged to come up with competing products and then "fight it out" (rumor had it this is what happened after Createspace lost out to the KDP team with paperback print on demand). Support teams from different groups do not work well with each other, and resolving problems that touch more than one team can turn into a nightmare as neither group wants to own the problem.

It seems the problem is "Ingram Spark".

A lot of complaints have them involved.

I would recommend you publish to KDP directly without a middle man

I know it's not a solution to your problem but have you tried or have any thoughts on this tool that's supposed to help distribute your ebook and also has done print on demand options? https://draft2digital.com/

That's one of the solutions I'm looking into. Right now I'm planning to publish the eBook through Ingram Spark. Other authors have done that and the eBook is still for sale on Amazon. You just can't take advantage of KDP Select, Kindle Unlimited, etc.

After this experience, even if KDP reinstated me now, I'd be terrified this could happen again at any time for any reason.

A similar thing happened to me but for FBA.

I was trying it out, and tried selling a very common thing on it.

Gave up.

I don't know where you live, and (anyway) I will drop a paragraph from GDPR right below. Although you don't have "legal effects" for not publishing your book, is it "significantly" affecting you (assuming you make a living from writing).

GDPR

Section 4

Right to object and automated individual decision-making

Article 22

Automated individual decision-making, including profiling

1. The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

It is not "decision based solely on automated processing", it is an underpaid human mindlessly clicking on preset buttons.

I imagine a scenario where upholding the AI bot's decision is one click of a button for a human. But going against the bot's decision requires filling out an onerous form and making an argument as to why the bot is wrong. And oh yeah, you're under quota to process so many appeals per hour.

All so some VP's slide can tout how much money their AI-powered fraud detection system has saved in human labor costs and its 97% success rate.

See, for all the talk of how the GDPR will lead to fines of "4% global turnover" it's been an abysmal failure in this regard.

My understanding is that you're not supposed to be subject to automated decision making (assuming the GDPR applies here).

Yet, what we see is a constant stream of robotic decisions. Although a human did "review" it there is no evidence of substantive human processing, probably just a 60 second "Yup. The computer was right".

Imagine if this was for something more serious, like ETIAS, and the human decision maker just looked at the computers decision, and because they are disgruntled with their salary, within 60 seconds they decide that what the computer decided must be correct. No thought or actual work went into making the human decision.

Technically, I suppose this wasn't automated decision making but without much human thought (which in this case how do we prove or disprove?) it may as well have been.

Something we do need to fix as AI and computers make more and more controlling deicisons and ensuring a human is required to perform a "substantive" review.

I am, however, interested in what that actually means. Do we need a human to produce a report? Do we need to see a liveness test showing the appeal form that they are reviewing and how long they spent looking at all the information?

For now, the human is there for "compliance" but is essentially just clicking a button called "agree with computer".

I would like to see statistics showing how long these "reviews" take, and how many uphold/reverse the robots decision.

Umm

I apologise for linking to an Amazon run site for this but for anyone not traumatised by the lived experience or retelling of this story, you may enjoy Service Model [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195790861-service-model

I wonder if cross-posting my own comment is forbidden here, but I hope not:

  We're living in times where big companies create (unlawful) unclear law systems (theoretically based on law _somewhere_) and force others to obey (you must agree to our terms), without giving a possibility to appeal nor have their rights proven under the real court (because it would be for example too expensive, or because that "you have accepted our terms").

  This was funny unless people's jobs and lives started to rely on those big companies, and their _de facto_ monopoly

But-but freedom means small state or no state at all! That way we can finally live under the law of corporations, without any decisional power or voting rights. What a dream.

Small government implies big corporations, and somehow this eludes many.

Do you think the US has small government now, that's created these big corporations?

They can both be big if the government isn't doing its job.

But you need a certain amount of government if you want a healthy regulation system with enforcement.

Even if government is doing the job they can still both be big. Look at China, big government biggish companies. Both by design of the government. Difference is that government makes sense of not giving the power away, unlike other governments do...

> Difference is that government makes sense of not giving the power away, unlike other governments do...

That is the most important point and tells you who's really ruling a country.

It seems that in practice, co-optation reduces effective size.

While it may be debatable if US is small government now, the recent overturning of Chevron by the Supreme Court leaves little doubt as to which direction it is going.

Okay, but the large corporations already exist, no? Large government also equals large corporations?

US government is not large compared to most other countries. A lot of the infrastructure that are controlled by government in other countries, are under private control, or under state control in the US at best. If the government is shrunk, the already large corporations will grow even larger.

Can you cite this, please? What infrastructure do you mean?

Relatively speaking, it has low corporation tax, is lax on market consolidation, and is less inclined to regulate for stuff like data privacy.

Until 2018 it had 35% corporation tax, which was high, and giant corporations happened anyway. It's now down to 21%, which is the EU average.

> is lax on market consolidation

Maybe? That doesn't seem to be particularly small government, though. It has anticompetition powers, and just hasn't used them.

> less inclined to regulate for stuff like data privacy

I don't know what the this stuff is, but the government's size wouldn't really change if they did this more. Some states already do it, and there are huge numbers of regulations to follow already. That's why drugs take years to hit the market; the FDA process is long.

All good points. I guess I was trying to isolate which aspects of US government have potentially led to powerful giants like Amazon, which can get away with some pretty horrific user experiences.

As a non-US person I have the opposite perspective. The US is almost the only place where companies can spring up and just be better than thousands of other companies, and bring me more value. Obviously that brings issues, but fundamentally for me at least I use Amazon because it's the best, even though I wish a local alternative would be better.

I'm also not from the US, and I agree that it has good startup potential. But the country seems to have issues with antitrust and multiple sectors becoming overly consolidated. Sometimes this is because one or a few companies genuinely have an outstanding product. I would say that used to be true of Amazon. But often it's because those companies have anti-competitive behaviours that help it to maintain market dominance without benefit to consumers. For example, Amazon effectively penalises sellers for offering cheaper prices elsewhere, which is the target of anti-trust cases both in the US and the EU.

I think it's probably more accurate to say "small regulation implies big corporations". Although that has less of a ring to it. And of course it also matters which regulations, how its enforced, etc. Tons of nuance of course. However, there's this notion that "less regulation == more freedom == better for everyone", and that's clearly just bollocks, usually to the benefit of corporations.

The free market competition inevitably has winners, that's what created big corporations. Once they're powerful enough, they can bend (lobby) the government to do what they want.

In fact any presidential candidate will need to have the approval of the richest people in the country to get anywhere, even just to pay for the campaign expenses.

That doesn't seem to be affected by the size of government.

Small government => big corporations (claim of the previous comment)

is not the same thing as

Big corporations => small goverment (the argument you're trying to disprove)

If only OP lived in the EU, this might all have been avoided.

Big corporations are ideally suited to the operating conditions of big government. They have the lawyers to understand the rules, the capital to withstand delays/penalties, and the lobbying power to influence regulation.

Lol. Tell that to insurance companies, which are regulated by the states. they LOVE it, as they have the scale to deal with a 50 state bureaucracy. Small government favors huge business.

Yes, as it is now regulations are just another tool in the hands of corporations, since they are the only ones to have the resources to work around them it further centralizes power in their hands.

The thing is without regulations you will still have a few huge actors emerge from the free market competition and then basically rule undisputed, while giving up a lot of the advantages of regulations.

So how do you solve it? Stop offloading vital services to the private sector. Allow it to innovate, but always with the possibility that the innovation they bring to the table will be incorporated as a public service. And let's drop the notion that only profit-hungry individuals can innovate, the state should be as capable as any corporation to innovate. It's just a matter of misallocated incentives.

yeah its well known that the USA has a super small state in which big corps have a lot of power /s

It's like reading again this classic sci-fi novel "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl.

Are you ready for Heddy?

Why are those systems unlawful?

I don't think anybody can force me to sell some items in my shop.

They're not unlawful but they are tyrannical.

Imagine a free market where landlords could lease to tenants on any terms mutually acceptable to both, on terms that could be continually revised. Like the terms on most standard websites.

A large rent change might encourage a tenant to leave the agreement. But a small, annoying and petty demand might not justify the hassle of the tenant leaving.

For example a landlord could suddenly and arbitrary ban carrots from being in the house. I don't particularly like carrots, and moving all my stuff to a different apartment to have the ability to eat them is hard to justify. But it's tyrannical of a landlord to exercise power like that.

That sums up a lot of peoples' relationship with the state. Only it's the "social contract" and you can't get out of it.

is this a Western democracy you are referring to?

It's pretty much universal.

no, in a democracy you get to vote on who you want to run the country. if you don't like the options, you need to run for election on your own platform. either way, you get the government you deserve.

Only in a kind of abstract way. Just like you can in theory buy ebooks from someone other than Amazon, or make a rival company, but it won't make any difference. The individual just has to accept whatever they are given.

if your platform doesn't take off, it means your offering isn't as popular as you think.

Good thing is that in a democracy you can choose who you vote, campaign for them or even get elected and change it.

And you can always personally not buy a given product from Amazon. It's about the same level of input.

Well, no. But you're also not really taking anyone's livelihood away if you choose to not sell some item in your shop.

It's the "de facto monopoly" that's key here; practically speaking the situation is "deal with corp X or bust", and avoiding these companies is typically an enormous uphill battle, or even border-line impossible in some cases.

Does Amazon have a de facto monopoly on book publishing in the US? (Not a rethorical question, I have almost zero knowledge about the business of book publishing.)

No, but they have close to one for e-books, and if you're self-publishing that is usually where most of your sales will be, as getting into a significant number of book stores w/selfpub is near impossible.

Most writers will sell next to nothing either way, so it won't usually make much difference, but being locked out of KDP will further diminish the odds by a rather large factor.

It seems weird to me that this post is now on page 12 of HackerNews, when all the other posts near it are either days old or only have a few points. https://i.imgur.com/tJ0ZbHE.png

Surely, Amazon's tentacles can't extend to our little walled garden here, can it?

I'd love for the people downvoting to tell me why I'm wrong to think this is weird.