Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

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slowmovintarget

How about Brandon Sanderson's criticism of Audible? [1]

> If you want details, the current industry standard for a digital product is to pay the creator 70% on a sale. It’s what Steam pays your average creator for a game sale, it’s what Amazon pays on ebooks, it’s what Apple pays for apps downloaded. (And they’re getting heat for taking as much as they are. Rightly so.)

> Audible pays 40%. Almost half. For a frame of reference, most brick-and-mortar stores take around 50% on a retail product. Audible pays indie authors less than a bookstore does, when a bookstore has storefronts, sales staff, and warehousing to deal with.

> I knew things were bad, which is why I wanted to explore other options with the Kickstarter. But I didn’t know HOW bad. Indeed, if indie authors don’t agree to be exclusive to Audible, they get dropped from 40% to a measly 25%. Buying an audiobook through Audible instead of from another site literally costs the author money.

What's worse is if the audio book goes into their subscription service, the author gets paid an even smaller fraction, as it is 25% or 40% of the fractional time on the subscription fee.

Amazon built the system to dominate the market, then used the dominant position to bully creators into a teeny tiny fraction of the profits Amazon makes on the work.

[1] https://www.brandonsanderson.com/state-of-the-sanderson-2022...

I covered this in other threads, basically. In truth, I was largely responding to this angle at the outset. DRM feels like a red herring that almost certainly exists due to demands from publishing houses. (I'll have to check to see if you can get any non-DRM files from libraries. My expectation is going to be a big no on that from any library that lends out audio books.)

The odd complaint here is that the authors are upset at getting a smaller share of a smaller sell, that is in a much larger sea of sales. They acknowledge that they make more money from audio books sold at audible, even with this cut.

This also does a shit job of showing the break down to the performers that are reading the book. If those are paid externally to the 40% that goes to the author, I really don't know how to take the complaints seriously other than greed on the authors that are talking about it.

The performers get paid up-front for the performance. This typically costs the author somewhere in the neighborhood of $10K to $40K including production costs.

Amazon originally paid out 70% like most other digital goods purveyors. Once they cornered the market they arbitrarily pushed it down to 25% (you only get 40% if you agree not to sell anywhere else). This means that for many authors, especially indie authors, they lose money publishing the audio version of their book.

Reading online, it is looking more like there are royalty shares. And I'm not clear on how "produced by Audible" works factor in there. Seems silly that the narrator wouldn't also be entitled to a per sale value.

I will also ack that I'm all for better legislation to help creators in a lot of this. I just don't know that this all is as clean a picture as you are making it. For an easy example, did audible drop their payout from 70 down to 20ish at the same time they dropped the average price that they sold at? That would change the story more than a little bit, if so. Do they also cover some of the upfront costs of production for some audio books?

You sure do have a LOT to say about Audible, despite demonstrating here a clear lack of understanding of how the service works, its market position, how much it charges, and so on.

JAQing off in defense of a monopolist is a bad look.

I'll gladly laugh and accept the jab that I'm a little too active in this thread. I don't know why this topic got me today, but it clearly did.

That said, please educate me on where I'm giving a clear lack of understanding on how it works. I'm basically seeing a couple big name authors that are effectively telling me I'm a bad person for buying audio books from Audible. But, far as I can see, every alternative is complete utter shite. Except the library, from which I still gladly get audio books on CD.

I don't think these authors intend for you to interpret their criticism of Audible's business practices as a statement about your moral character. One of their central points is that Audible's business practices have severely limited consumer choice in the audiobook market. You can't be held morally responsible for a choice that's been taken out of your hands.

May not be their intent, but at large declaiming something is bad and "enshitifying" the internet is a very transitive label?

And again, there is no evidence that audible is lessoning consumer choice? There is some evidence that they lesson producer practical choice. But even that is weak? With few exceptions, mostly audible produced works, I can find all of the books I care about elsewhere.

The cumulative point of this thread seems to be that they are getting to work with 75% of 90% of the audible book market (you claim books are available elsewhere = 25% commission).

You can call that whatever you want, but it sounds a lot like the descent to pre-Internet situations that weren't markers of stable quality and that many people who survived the 1980s don't want to see again.

I'm not clear on this post? What do you mean?

They have 90% of the audio book market, likely. They do not have exclusives on that much, though. I'd hazard that 90% of the available book market is through the major publishers, still. At large, this makes sense, as most books are still written with upfront payments from publishers.

I would also not really shed much of a tear for Audible. I just don't understand the idea that getting rid of them moves us further from the old style. Seems more likely that the publishers would brow beat any future entry into the market so that it was much closer to how things were in the 80s and 90s.

A 40% cut makes sense in a world where Amazon pays the voice actor.

My understanding is that is not how this works. The author pays the voice actor, or the publisher does. Amazon is paying for hosting an audio file, basically, and the development of the player app, and that's it.

I think in the very early days, Amazon may have paid all the voice actors itself (because no one was on board with audio yet at that point), and the 40% royalty model may have made sense. But I believe that is not how it works now, and 40% royalties make a lot less sense in the world we now live in; it seems to be just purely predatory.

My understanding is that it will depend on the book? I'd love to see more discussion on that whole ecosystem, honestly. Some of the first searches seem decent to read on.

I just know that, even today, the audio books I purchase are far cheaper if I get them from Audible than basically anywhere else. Unless it is a book on CD I get from the library, for obviously different reasons.

I also know that things are byzantine to get an audio book from a library. Largely due to the influence of publishers, not tech companies.

I remember when audiobooks from the library were literally books on tape. You'd get a giant binder with like 20 cassettes tapes in it. I think the biggers one were also split up, so you could checkout, say, 10 hours worth at a time.

We still have a box of a lot of books on tape we found in a garage sale around here. Had to get a tape player for the kids to listen to them, as they were the kind where they had the books with them, too. Was a ton of fun, if a touch annoying to deal with rewinding the tape and such.

We also still have more than a few books on CD. We don't get as many as we used to, ironically, since it is far more convenient to use audible. Nice to shift from car to bedroom for stories.

I've been curious on why more "music players" weren't better at audio books. I'm guessing the ability to save mid track is just not nearly as big of a deal for most music applications?

Exactly. You can still find a few devices that did it (often out of Japan, especially minidisk players, for example), but most had no permanent memory or only a few bytes for radio stations, and of course you can't write to a CD.

Many car CD-players handled it just fine.

Every car stereo I've had for at least the past decade automatically saves the position when you turn the car off.

My understanding is that Amazon runs imprints, like Audible Originals [1], that basically act like a publisher. I.e., they buy the rights, produce the audio, pay the voice actor, and the author gets some royalty (presumably smaller than 40%).

But my understanding is that the large publishers mostly do this themselves (and therefore have to pay the voice actor out of the 40% cut they get). Similarly, independent authors won't get access to this level of service; in some cases they're literally reading the book themselves, but they still only get the 40% cut (and that's with exclusivity).

The reason why audiobooks are cheaper is due to the subscription model. That's the chief innovation that Amazon pioneered with Audible. Now, their clout certainly also had something to do with it, and the burgeoning Kindle ecosystem. But the issue of price is really a matter of subscriptions being stickier and keeping customers in the ecosystem longer, making it possible to make aggregate more money. It's the same business model as Netflix, Dropbox, Adobe CC, etc.

[1]: https://www.audible.com/ep/audible-originals

I'd only rephrase your later paragraph to say that the reason it is cheaper is because Audible chased their marginal cost advantage of copies and drove for cheaper sales. Publishers have known of subscription models forever, such that they could have done this years ago. They didn't, because they chased the marginal costs of printing books so that that was their advantage.

That is, the new advances in audio recording and digital distribution led to a vastly superior marginal cost environment that didn't exist back in the 80s/90s. Publishers decided not to lean in on that, and by the time Audible had demonstrated that it was a viable market, it was too late for them to squeeze them on license costs.

I admit this sounds almost conspiratorial, but they literally colluded to try and force higher prices on ebooks. Such that I don't find this that beyond the pale.

I really don't want to defend Amazon's practices on this, but

> Amazon is paying for hosting an audio file, basically, and the development of the player app, and that's it.

"development of the player app" is kind of load-bearing in that sentence:

They host a directory of books and provide recommendations (which amounts to lead-gen, probably (?) increasing the number of copies of your book that sell because users stumble upon it either by browsing or by searching for keywords).

They take payments (not a high bar, but that's 1-3% if you wanted to do it "yourself", not to mention the cost of either integrating with a payment provider yourself or paying somebody to do it, so it shouldn't be forgotten about).

Finally, their model where you pay a subscription that gets you a credit per month or whatever leads to even more book sales. I hate this model and I finally ejected myself from the Audible ecosystem, but before I did I spent a bunch of credits that I had saved up.

The audible drm is also pretty trivially stripped if you actually care about such things. It aint exactly AACS.

That's good. But it shouldn't be on there in the first place.

Sorry, I just don't understand the complaint, if you don't like audiable, then don't do business with them? You can sell your book yourself directly.

That's exactly what Cory Doctorow is doing (no idea about Sanderson). Not just directly, but on every platform that's not Audible.

That doesn't make the complaint less relevant, though. The complaint is the explanation for why they're doing so.

Sanderson specifically went looking for platforms that don't just put the book on Audible. So Spotify and Speechify.

Sorry, I don't understand your complaint. If you don't want to hear Cory Doctorow's complaints about Audible, then don't read his blog.

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