Aren't all stores a 'walled garden'? They decide what they want to sell. Curation. Seems completely reasonable to me?
> Instead, Doctorow is selling the recorded version of the book through a Kickstarter campaign, and it will also be available through non-Amazon vendors like Google’s Play store and libro.fm
So there's multiple competing options he can already use? What on earth is the problem here?
The problem is scale: "... if you don’t sell on Audible, you sacrifice about 95% of that income. That’s a decision I’ve made, and it means that publishers are no longer willing to pay for my audiobook rights (who can blame them?). According to my agent, living my principles this way has cost me enough to have paid off my mortgage and maybe funding my retirement. I’ve tried a lot of tactics to get around Audible; selling through the indies (libro.fm, downpour.com, etc), through Google Play, and through my own shop (craphound.com/shop). I appreciate the support there but it’s a tiny fraction of what I’m giving up ..."
https://craphound.com/news/2020/09/08/my-first-ever-kickstar...
Can we rephrase that as:
> if you don’t sell in the way that 95% of customers want to buy, you sacrifice about 95% of that income
Then it seems obvious what the problem is?
> Can we rephrase that as:
> > if you don’t sell in the way that 95% of customers want to buy, you sacrifice about 95% of that income
> Then it seems obvious what the problem is?
Yes. The problem is that the distribution channel that owns 95% of the market (by most definitions a monopoly) is forcing publishers to use DRM even if they (or the authors) don't want it, locking in users to the distribution channel's platform.
Now, sometimes lock-in is a side effect of some feature or attribute that is at least ostensibly user-focused (eg. network effects: you're locked into a social network because all your friends are there, and getting your personal data out doesn't help with that), but DRM doesn't fit into that bucket. All else being equal, no user actually prefers content that they can enjoy in limited ways, for less time, on fewer of their devices, with less forward compatibility and future-proofing, etc.
During the '90s the cargo-cult argument that DRM was necessary to convince content owners worried about piracy to allow their albums/movies/books to be distributed in new digital formats and channels in the first place could still be made with a straight face, but that isn't really the case any longer.
I'd call them "gardens". I'd called them "walled" if they use DRM and force you to consume it in their garden.
Like a restaurant without a takeaway service? How evil.
In the UK restaurants don’t do this so your surety is misplaced.
> When you "buy" a book you should be able to read it whenever you want forever and not rely on the company you bought it from not going out of business.
That’s what you care about. What I care about is most convenient access now. Why is your priority the true one and mine a result of abuse?
Lack of DRM is most convenient. (Unless corporate abuse has made it impossible to use [whichever format is most convenient] without applying DRM, obviously.)
Since, you know, DRM is there to actively prevent you from doing something, so comparing it with just passively not offering a service is more than a little dishonest.
If I agree to that, and it's worth it to me... what's your problem with that?
I don’t think this is true. In fact I people are listening to more books than before and spending more on them than before. Audible are injecting oxygen into the room!
> In 2020, Deloitte predicts, the global audiobook market will grow by 25 percent to US$3.5 billion.
That’s what we should really care about - books read. And money spent is great as well.
People here forget what books are for - reading. They aren’t supposed to be vehicles for copyright activism.
Edit0: BTW, no one has forgotten what books are for. It is Audible with its restrictions that has made reading (or listening) into a hindrance. Are you able to accept that this is my experience/opinion?
I can readily accept your opinion.
But when I say 'I'm happy with the tradeoffs and the book world is far better with Audible without and it's a fine consensual business relationship' then everyone tries to remove my agency and that I could only say such a thing under abuse.
Audiobooks used to be astronomically expensive, hard to buy, hard to use. Thanks to Audible I'm reading more than ever. There's a minor trade-off of DRM which isn't really even a theoretical problem for me or I think the vast vast majority of people, but people forget all that and call them 'abusive'. I think it's nasty and unreasonable.
> I don’t think this is true. In fact I people are listening to more books than before
Are you deliberately misinterpreting what the parent poster wrote? It sucks the oxygen away from other bookstores. Hence the "Eventually alternatives die". That people spend money on Audible is not a counter-argument.
> That’s what we should really care about - books read. [..] People here forget what books are for - reading. They aren’t supposed to be vehicles for copyright activism.
Are you really, really unable to see the danger in relinquishing control over your devices and media?
Devices I get, but I don't really understand it for media. What I really want is Netflix for Audiobooks. I'm not ever going to listen to them again. I've also never really understood why people buy DVDs. I mean, I understand the fact folks want to watch a movie more than once, but that seems so odd to me, you already know the story ... there is no novelty anymore. I buy books, but only if there are references, or classics that I'd like my children to be exposed to as some point. I see no need to buy copies of the pulp sci-fi I read too much of, kindle copies are fine.
Audible+ that just launched comes close, but the catalogue is weak for new titles. Libby/Overdrive comes close, but rarely have want I want within a timeframe I'd like.
I'm willing to pay for convenience, of an ephemeral entertainment experience. Sure, I know some folks want to pay to reread, relisten, or rewatch their favorites, and doing so without DRM would be nice.
But as long as the data is accessible in some form, it doesn't seem a fundamental issue. Non-resource based monopolies are only sustainable if they keep their customers happy. There is plenty of money to be made with alternatives if they find a way to either suck to cost too much and longer term copyright expires. That is the real answer, copyright should be shrunk to something like 25 years, ignoring the author's life, and be transferable to their estate.
B) when was the last time you went to a restaurant that wouldn't let you box whatever was left of your meal?
C) you're arguing elsewhere that Audible is actually awesome because it makes your life better by allowing you to do things like manage your entire library in one place that syncs to all of your devices. How can you understand that benefit, but simultaneously not understand the practical lock-in effect of Amazon forcing you to abandon every audiobook you ever purchased just because you switched to a new service?
The restaurant analogy is terrible. It's more like imagining that your JC Penny clothes could only be worn with other JC Penny clothes, and if you ever wanted to shop at Target you'd need to have two wardrobes, one for each store, or you'd be committing a felony.
I'm going to step out and say that yes, that kind of behavior is anti-competitive, anti-consumer, and to the extent that an amoral market can be evil, it's evil.
B) Last week. You can’t take leftovers home where I live it’s considered gross.
C) I don’t mind the lock-in because the value with it (convenience, price) makes it worthwhile.
People here can’t accept I value convenience over abstract rights.
"This restaurant serves spoiled eggs."
"But I don't eat eggs, so that doesn't matter."
> I value convenience over abstract rights.
They're not abstract rights, Amazon in the real world has taken over pretty much the entire audiobook market and used their market dominance to force publishers and writers to bend to increasingly unfair terms. The lock-in isn't abstract, I've talked to people in the real world who are interested in getting other readers but feel like they can't because they'd lose their existing library. Real people are being prevented from moving services in the real world.
You might not care about those rights, and you might not care about how they influence how the market you participate in evolves over time and what innovations from that market you get to access. But even if you don't care about that stuff, all of it is real and has real consequences. To say they're abstract is an even stranger position for you to take:
"This restaurant serves spoiled eggs."
"The eggs aren't on my plate, so they're entirely theoretical."
> You can’t take leftovers home where I live it’s considered gross.
Minor sidenote, but you're missing out. One of the best parts of eating out is that you have some leftovers for supper that night and don't need to cook. I highly recommend it if you've never tried it before.
Also consider: it may be culturally unacceptable to carry leftovers home, but would you be arrested if you tried to? Would it be a federal offense?
Amazon seems to have gained its dominance by making them cheaper to the point where people can really afford them as an alternative to hard/paperbacks.
For all the hatred of amazon in this thread, I suspect the audiobook market would be a fraction of what it is now without them or someone who looks exactly like them.
Amazon itself got popular by offering good prices and product selections. That doesn't mean modern concerns about how they treat their workers/drivers should be dismissed, it doesn't mean current concerns about how they screen for imposter sellers and group projects together aren't valid. It doesn't mean that their usage of 3rd-party seller data to push their own product development isn't anticompetitive.
Even still, I doubt you'd see as much hatred of amazon in this thread if it wasn't for their DRM, lack of Linux/OS support, and some of their more arduous publisher terms (not allowing publishers to sell without DRM, forcing exclusives, etc). I don't think that stuff has anything to do with growing the market. I don't think taking away user rights is an essential part of offering cheaper prices, and I especially don't think that having cheap prices somehow excuses their other anticompetitive behavior.
Should we stop criticizing Spotify's co-opting of the podcast movement just because they popularized music streaming and managed to get musicians to accept much worse terms for payouts? Should we stop criticizing Netflix's push for DRM standards on the web just because they started out with a great DVD rental service?
So research library rules, but retail-ownership pricing.
And to be clear, there are numerous ways short of Amazon going under that could result in a reader/listener no longer having access to their content. Say your phone provider stops allowing the Audible app on your phone, you can no longer use your content.
To many, once a book is purchased, they should be able to enjoy it the way they want and DRM either prevents that or threatens to prevent that for your entire library. You can expect that as a user you'll have little to no recourse should that happen.
There is also the discontent that DRM isn't necessarily being used to ensure payment, but being used to gouge the buyers. Less so than it was, but a lot of ebooks were costing more than their physical counterparts because there was no used/library channel for competition.
I'd say it's 30% chance of an ebook being cheaper on Kobo, 30% chance of an ebook being cheaper on Kindle, and 40% chance of the price being the same on both. I only remember one example of an ebook being absurdly cheaper on Kindle (like $10 compared to >$20), everything else deviates by like a dollar or two one side or the other.
If it's digital, it can be copied. With audio, the analogue loophole (record the output off an aux cable, re-digitize) is trivial, and any loss of fidelity won't be noticed.
So your "if" is kind of bootless here. Audible's platform, convenience, and the desire to do the right thing and reward creators, is the "good thing", and DRM is a paranoid annoyance.
This is the world in which, if your life's work is an audio file, it can easily be duplicated millions of times. It's as conducive to the creation of new art as any such world would be.