Hacker News Reader

Comment by phony-account | Hacker News Reader

Almost the worst thing about Amazon and this gouging way of renting books is that it ‘legitimizes’ piracy. My partner works in publishing and we know a lot of authors. If you think piracy is going to sustain that industry and give you and your children books to read in the years and decades to come, you’re very mistaken.

View on HN

As an author, I barely get any money from Amazon. In some cases, with the cut Amazon and the publisher take, I make a few pennies on a $30 book.

If you buy my book directly from my publisher's website, I'm extremely grateful. I get a fair amount for that. If you buy it from a local bookstore, at least they benefit.

But if you buy it from Amazon, you might as well just get it from Anna's Archive. At least you're not supporting the jungle.

I would love to buy ebooks directly from publishers, but publishers generally sell ebooks with DRM just as bad as Amazon's DRM, if not worse. If publishers insist on vendor lock-in, then I might as well stick with Kindle where most of my ebook collection already is.

You can buy a copy of the ebook from the publisher (or whatever source the author tells you is the best for them), and then acquire a useable copy by other means. You get an ebook, the author (and publisher) gets a sale.

Can you clarify if you're talking about physical and/or ebooks?

Both.

I contacted a well known author about the shit latex rendering of his ebooks on Amazon. He said sorry and send me the a pdf copy he build with my name on all the pages. I really like the fact that I have a book dedicated to me by the author, but why the fuck do we need Amazon in this interaction?

In fairness you are the reason for needing Amazon. If you purchased it elsewhere Amazon would cease to exist.

It was the only place where you could purchase the ebook.

and that would be bad?

Lot of people have asked that question ever since Amazon (Platform Economy[0]) emerged. But the answer is not simple.

This is why experiments like ONDC[1] (being pushed by the Indian Govt) are interesting. They want an alternative path between producer and consumer with out a middleman (Platform). Similar to how email works based on open protocols. Or UPI which has reduced dependence on Mastercard/Visa.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_economy [1] https://ondc.org/learn-about-ondc/

What’s an authors perspective on libraries, including ebooks from apps like Libby?

Libraries buy ebooks with your property tax dollars. The more patrons read, the more copies they buy. Authors and publishers like this.

Authors love libraries, because libraries create readers. Publishers don't so much, because though libraries have to buy books, a lot of individuals read a specific copy of a book, which means they aren't buying the book.

I have no idea how publishers feel about used book stores.

I'm only speaking for myself, not other authors. As with most authors who write books on technology, I don't depend on my income from writing, so it might be different for professional authors whose primary income is from writing.

But personally, when I went to a local library, saw that they had two copies of my first book, and both were checked out, I was incredibly proud. I love libraries. I guess overall, I would make more money if everybody who checked out my book at the library bought it instead, but I don't care.

Then why do you sell on Amazon?

Publishers decide where to sell, not authors.

I know you probably don't have the option since it's part of the publishing contract, but if you could, would you opt out of being listed on Amazon and just sell direct from the publisher's site?

This is something that regularly comes up in discussions between authors and my publisher, but the reality is that not being on Amazon hurts books. Amazon has essentially a monopoly on book sales. If you're not on Amazon, it hurts your reviews on other sites like Goodreads, which in turn decreases sales on the few other outlets that still exist.

What my publisher does is sell books on Amazon, and then put a page in it to tell people to please buy the next book directly on the publisher's site. They believe that this is overall the least bad option.

Is that true? I see book shops in every town. As for e-books, distribution of these small files cannot be too much of a technical challenge.

I think it wouldn't be too difficult to make a system for authors to sell their e-books and physical books themselves on their own websites, but the problem is that authors would rage with fury for paying an upfront cost or paying 10% for such a system, and instead stay with the publishers to rip them off instead. You see this in every industry.

Do authors not have agents any more? If an agent is that bad at negotiating residuals why even have them.

Because your own ability is even lower, and nobody else gets any more?

This is not about residuals, it's about Amazon being a monopoly that can dictate terms to publishers.

huh, the publisher i work for pays 25 perecent of net receipts on ebook sales. and we’re an academic nonprofit org.

TBH, I haven't looked into exact numbers in a while, but the way I recall it is that for a Kindle book, you get 35% royalties. So in your case, if a book sold for $30, you'd get $2.6 for that book, which is already not great. If you factor in publisher expenses, taxes, maybe advances, etc., you may end up with a very low amount, depending on how exactly your publisher calculates these.

Tech books tend to not sell very high numbers (a book on a niche programming language is considered quite successful if it sells 10k copies), so it's important to make a good amount of money on each individual sale.

So for me personally, Kindle sales in particular are essentially worthless. Let's say I end up making 2 bucks on a Kindle sale (which is more than I make on average). If I sold 10k Kindle books, that would be 20k income for me, which is simply nowhere near enough to justify the effort of writing a book.

well, if you haven’t earned out your advance, and you encourage people to pirate, you’ll never earn out your advance. i don’t recall exactly offhand, but our net on an Amazon ebook sale is about 70% of list.

I'll never earn out my advance on Amazon sales, period.

The 70% royalty is only available to books below $10, and also incurs other costs from Amazon. Which makes the calculation even worse, because now you're forced to sell at a lower cost, and you pay additional flat fees to Amazon for each sale.

In your case, if you sell the book for $10, you get about $6 ($7 minus fees), of which you get 25%, so you also only end up with about $1.50 per sale.

i think you need to find a better publisher.

It doesn't matter who the publisher is. I've shown the calculations for Amazon's take. I've pointed out how many copies reasonably successful tech books sell. The numbers don't work.

Plenty of books I've tried to purchase epub or PDFs of only have Kindle rental versions.

If the publishers of these authors wanted me to let me own a PDF, I'd gladly purchase, but until they actually do that I have several easy alternatives to getting sucked into Amazon's ridiculous ecosystem.

And this is a larger subset of books I want to buy than I would want, surprisingly.

I say the same thing about GNU licensed software: if the author just gave me my preferred licensing terms, I wouldn't be forced to use it in proprietary software without compenstion.

How is pirating books to read them by myself comparable to proactively selling other people's work?

Neither belonged to you in the first place.

And yet, one of these options is much more benign than the other.

nope.

Indeed, it is!

> without compenstion

A key point here is that GP expressed a willingness to pay. The analogy would be attempting to license a piece of GPL software that you've decided to integrate into your proprietary stack and being outright refused for ideological reasons. Still illegal but people are probably going to perceive it a bit differently.

I think it’s wrong to pirate books, but making it harder and harder to use the thing someone buys will push people to pirate. The onerous DRM from the likes of publishers and Amazon will eventually back fire on them. They are fighting hard to not have books end up like music, but I feel it’s inevitable.

I think it's contextual whether it's even wrong to pirate books. A new book that just came out? Sure. If I want to read a copy of "Titus Groan" by Mervyn Peake, who died in 1968, you'd have to do some marvelous convincing to make me feel bad about pirating it. Piracy would be wrong if the copyright system was reasonable. As is, it's the lesser of two evils compared to following the law as written.

No argument from me around copyright being too long.

My point was mainly saying the publishers are working hard to avoid their Napster moment, but missing that it wasn't only about 'free' music, but convenience. The harder publishers make it to use their content legally, the more people they will push to the pirate sites.

What's that capitalist moniker: adapt or die.

When we pay for a good, be it digital or physical, we want possession and ownership of that good.

When your class of people demand 'licenses to read' instead of the actual ownership of the book, you can shove it.

I would rather pay pirates to get actual non-DRM books than buy the temporary permission to view., especially since the eBook is more expensive.

I will buy physical books, drm-free books, and pirate. I'm not paying hard earned money for a temporary license.

If your publishers and authors can't understand first sale doctrine and actual ownership, then you can close up shop and quit.

Moniker or not, I don't see Amazon or Kindle going anywhere anytime soon.

We need an AI that produces the text of a book, from a video of it as you flip through its pages. No special hardware, just a phone and a thumb. If a few pages get missed it can ask you to do it again.

well, patreon definitely sustains the industry

people on royalroad make $10K a month, many more make over $1K...

and then there's AO3, the monster in the dark with everything for everyone

Well it does - if the business of Amazon is immoral, buying from them is immoral. Therefore piracy becomes the lesser evil.

Or patronize your local library.

I think the library would get upset at the way I highlight my books.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com