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A comment on Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speech-to-text feature. Parent comment

Re:Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speec... by dagw on Monday August 26, 2019 @08:40AM (#20799324)
Try starting from the author. The author invested his own time and wrote a thing, but for whatever reason didn't want to go out and sell it himself. So he sold a company the rights to print and sell text copies of the thing he'd written. He then sold the rights to sell audio books of his work to a different company (and perhaps the right to make TV show of his book to a third company).

The only reason a company was willing to pay for the rights to the text copy of the work was because they where being guaranteed some sort of monopoly. If that monopoly is weakened then they have less incentives to pay the author.

If that is a good or bad outcome is left as an exercise to the reader.

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Re:Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speec... by pbhjpbhj on Monday August 26, 2019 @08:46AM (#20799373)
Do you think that's how it works in practice, any evidence?

I suspect the authors now are getting the same, or less, and the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower) and taking a higher proportion.

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Re:Major book publishers sue Amazon’s Audible over new speec... by ghaff on Monday August 26, 2019 @09:13AM (#20799583)
>the publishers are both charging more for digital (despite their costs being lower)

The costs associated with printing and distributing a physical book are a much smaller slice of the pie than a lot of people assume. (Back when I looked into this, it was about $2.50 per copy for a hardback as I recall. The author cost for a PoD trade paperback from Amazon is about $5.)

Also, in general, the end-user price for books is generally significantly lower than it used to be. Go back a couple decades and you mostly paid list price for books and paperbacks usually weren't available for a year or so after a book came out in hardcover.

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