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Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.

If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?

On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?

Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.

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> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?

Some do!

https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm

Read the Rifter's trilogy because of this, quite good IMO. Made buying Blindsight in hardcopy way easier once money wasn't a strain.

> If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?

> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?

We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.

Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?

This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).

I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).

I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...

But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.

I agree it's a difficult problem. For scifi, I usually look for Hugo or Nebula winners, but also word of mouth and recommendations.

Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble.

I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.

Yes unfortunately any system can be gamified once the incentives are there: Best wine, best movie, best album, best keyboard, best monitor, the list goes on. Hugo or Nebula winners, and any other "winner" for that matter are usually actively sponsored and artificially pushed onto the nomination lists by their publishers/influencers/etc, there is just no way the judges can read the 1000's of novels that come out each year.

Occasionally indie authors beat the system like Andy Weir with the Martian, but that took both good writing and a lot of traction from his online community for it to go viral and for it to get recognition.

True in principle, but I find in practice the Hugo and Nebula seldom disappoint me (in the sense of having wasted my time, not that every winner is a masterpiece). And these are not the only prizes (or genres), I just mentioned two. There are also magazines, reviews, etc. Sometimes following an author you like on Twitter or whatever helps see what they like.

Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.

In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...

>This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. [...] This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform.

If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.

A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors.

I have no desire to become a millionaire and I already have a job, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?

You said it's easy to disrupt, as per the quote, and I showed you it really isn't easy to disrupt, because if it was, someone else would have attempted it already.

Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.

No.

You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy".

Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a dumb cliche and also uncalled for, since I was merely writing my opinion, not challenging you or calling you out.

> and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.

The HN guidelines ask you to reply to the most charitable interpretation of a comment. Do you honestly think that's what you did with your millionaire comment?

> someone else would have attempted it already.

You don't know that it hasn't (or isn't being attempted), and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does. Like you said, especially now in the age of LLMs, and especially with Amazon become worse and worse.

Many of us do. But the majority of ebook readers will: a)never find us and b)just want to click buy now not download epub (from a site they have never heard of) then transfer to kindle manually. So best to cover your bases and give them the Amazon option too.

Yeah… There’s a few things I think the tech crowd misses the mark on when discussing media creators of all sorts:

- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.

- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.

- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.

Because Amazon gets millions of views per day, and their personal website gets a dozen or so. Literally the only reason.

or use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.

Cloudflare is just another middleman.

sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant. Open AI wants to provide all Americans stock options, which is one way but the more the merrier.

>sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant

Oh that's coming, don;t you worry, the legislative part just hasn't caught up with the LLM business yet since none of them are making much profit yet so there's nothing you can shake out of them yet

What I mean by this is, in many EU countries, the unions of creative artist have lobbied the government to make us pay a "piracy tax" on all storage devices sold in the country, from blank CDs and HHDs to SSDs and mobile phones with EMMC/NAND. The same thing will happen with AI companies, once they become profitable enough, they'll force the consumers subscription prices to include an extra tax that will go back to the major rights holder part of the unions.

Sure and we as developers can vibe code other systems / ways to ensure we get paid for keeping AI relevant.

SW developers don't have the union bargaining power the music and arts industry has. At least not where I live.

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