Since Amazon had been selling books on the Kindle app for a while, I assume they made more than 30% to be worth it, or pushed the cost to the publishers? Or probably worked out some deal with Google, which seems a bit unlikely.
So basically Google 3$, Amazon 4$, publisher 3$.
If you go to Amazon marketplace directly, Amazon gets 6$, publisher gets 4$.
Amazon complaining about predatory marketplace is rich.
That only explains steps 1-2.
Okay, so Steps 1-2 can be explained by the closed ecosystem of the device. You don't get these hurdles if your device is not closed-off.
Step 3 can be explained by the retailer of that good complying with international IP laws.
Step 4 is just step 1 for everyone else.
Step 5 is a legitimate WTF moment.
Step 6 is once again the result of avoiding the open ecosystem (the web).
Of those 6 steps that the GP complained about:
1. 3 of them are self-inflicted because of his choice of device and usage,
2. 1 is due to legal issues,
3. 1 is not a valid complaint,
4. 1 is an actual and valid complaint about the lack of a feature in the app.
I imagine that Amazon did the math here and decided that the 30% is more than the lost sales due to the obnoxious process involved, but I struggle to see how that's true.
Personally, I stick with paper books for kids, even books (and not picture books.)
EDIT: Added a missing closing parentheses. I'm a bad LISPer...
Opening amazon.com via Safari on an iphone is a throwback and a very odd experience - I haven’t needed to use a mobile version of amazon.com in ages - i use the app for all my Amazon shopping.
And one other thing - I can’t stand Musk, but given my experience with Amazon in a world where WeChat exists - perhaps Musk has a chance with his X super app plan after all.
This does not apply to physical goods. Which is why all the apps you mentioned are fine.
This is the same issue that has been talked about for years, the cause of Epic (Fortnite) vs Apple, etc.
However once you started on a browser, the rest of your story I would agree with.
> This does not apply to physical goods.
I don't really get this division other than "it's what Apple could get away with". As far as the payment processing is concerned, it seems like a distinction without a difference.
They provide no service, hopefully soon it will be illegal.
I genuinely don't understand how you can simultaneously post these stats and claim that Apple's business model is bad for people that develop apps for Apple's devices. As a collective they make BILLIONS of dollars per year more.
Far more egregious is that Google charge a similar fee and do basically nothing to moderate the platform at all. If anything is rent-seeking, it is that. Apple does a huge amount to moderate and review apps when they go out. It was a hassle, as an app developer, to have to go through that process. But the result is an ecosystem where people trust apps enough that they'll spend significant amounts of money on them. Who would spend anything on an Android app when you have no idea if it's actually good or if it just has a completely astroturfed review score?
Google also reviews apps using humans, and allows 3rd party app stores.
Interestingly they say their 15-30% fee pays for Android development. You'd think Apple's $400 profit per phone would pay for iOS development.
Apparently Google Play Store Kindle app has the same restrictions
The world we now live in is that all "apps and programs" can be either a one-off purchase like a physical good or a subscription. That subscription might be for the "app" or it may be packaged as a subscription to a "service" that the app is facilitating (the line between the two is very blurry). Additionally, all digital goods like books, music and movies may also be a one-off purchase or a "subscription" like audible, apple music, etc.
The line between all of those is blurry such that, any set of rules you write leaves it open to convert "app sales" to "services/subscriptions" or even to bundle access to your app or it's content as "digital goods" to avoid that 30% cut. People would (and do) switch their sales model to then avoid that cut.
I don't have a solution and I don't think Apple or the open webs way is specifically better in every aspect, but I do think it's interesting to think about the problem space.
I'm curious if giving books for free (eg Libby) is allowed, or if they've gotten a special exemption
...
> i use the app for all my Amazon shopping.
Because Apple allows it. It's their prerogative, after all, not Amazon's.
I mean, really, if your employer told you that the only way they can pay you is if you used their in-house payment system that took 75% of your pre-tax earnings as a commission, you'd go elsewhere too.
compare this with the piracy option: search for torrent or download link, click, wait for download to finish. Upload to device. Read and enjoy.
Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons?
How would you feel, if you were an author, and people openly advocated piracy, such that you were deprived of sales, and earning an honest living?
but the post above explain an arduous process for a purchase, and i would expect that there's not an insignificant number of people who would've given up in the middle.
So do you also feel that you need to make the same complaint of a lost sale to amazon? Why target pirates specifically? Whether they _consumed_ content or not, is irrelevant - in both scenarios, you would've "lost" a sale.
What it does show is that innovative businesses will, over time, become like the dinosaurs they out-competed, and leave room for something new. Piracy will probably always be there, even when buying is not arduous.
Words have meaning. Arduous it ain't.
> Tiresome doesn't necessarily mean physically tired.
Not necessarily, no, not at all. I suggest a dictionary. Back in the day, people who cared about reading and the meaning of words would keep one handy, often next to the bed.
> a : hard to accomplish or achieve : difficult
~ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/arduous
Pretty sure this process qualifies as "hard" when compared to standard methods of purchasing digital goods.
Always fun when someone wants to argue about the definition of a word without actually using the definition of the word.
If you knew how to use a dictionary you wouldn’t have left out the helpful examples:
> 1a : hard to accomplish or achieve : DIFFICULT an arduous task years of arduous training
> b : marked by great labor or effort : STRENUOUS … a life of arduous toil. —A. C. Cole
> 2 : hard to climb : STEEP an arduous path arduously adverb arduousness noun
Life, years, climb. No, it does not count as arduous in the slightest. First world problems, is that in the dictionary, I wonder?
... right?
Anyway, you seem very confused with internet vernacular; everyone else was able to grasp the context. You appear to be the only individual experiencing difficulties. Just saying.
Inane, specious, and mendacious are other entries in the dictionary that come to mind. I also have no trouble comprehending the argument before me, it’s simply misdescribed. Can you not comprehend that? Apparently not.
> an arduous task
And let's take a look back to the post to which you originally replied!
> but the post above explain an arduous process
Wow, those look really similar, don't they? The quoted usage you find so objectionable is /nearly identical/ to the example you yourself copied. Galaxy brain.
Here's another definition you might want to study. It will really help reduce your confusion with internet interactions:
Hyperbole (noun) > extravagant exaggeration (such as "mile-high ice-cream cones")
I truly believe once you internalize this information you will grasp where you went wrong.
Beginning a back and forth over how to use a dictionary with someone who defines how to use a dictionary after the fact to help their point?
> Galaxy brain.
This is not Reddit or Twitter, please refrain from such petty, openly disrespectful and, shall we say arduous, slurs.
I'll take that as an admission you know you're wrong.
Here's some more advice for ya: Do your homework next time and come prepared. Or maybe, just maybe, don't try to play the pedantic card. It's clearly not your best game.
Here's the Creative Commons Search portal: https://search.creativecommons.org/
I tried Openverse and Europeana. Some of these appear to categorize eBooks as "images", or perhaps they are just promotional images for unfree books. Tens of thousands of results.
Here's a Google Books search. I was unable to find a "search for license" type thing, but you can search for "Fully viewable" or "Google eBooks only":
https://www.google.com/search?tbo=p&tbm=bks&q=-copyright&tbs...
My father loves HathiTrust, and so do many other people who love freedom: https://www.hathitrust.org/
Of course you know the Internet Archive and Open Library: https://openlibrary.org/
Wikisource hosts lots of freely-licensed text, in many, many languages; here's English: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Main_Page
Never forget the O.G. PD site, Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/
Also, while it is not the written word, it is based on awesome freely-available books, and perhaps you could consider adding to the library at LibriVox: https://librivox.org/search?primary_key=0&search_category=au...
My classmates at school ate this stuff up when I volunteered that there are sites where you can find awesome public domain reference material that's often better-quality than the paywalled stuff you pay for.
Don't forget the Open Textbooks and freely licensed academic materials. Community colleges and universities will direct you to those.
https://oercommons.org/hubs/open-textbooks https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks
Don't forget niche uses and special interests. Want to overcome your addiction to porn? Download some free eBooks: https://www.covenanteyes.com/e-books/
Honestly, I would have given up at the very first step. It clearly says that the content is available, but vendor is explicitly refusing to serve the content.
I mean, I support civil disobedience, and jury nullification, and such things, but those are generally personal matters, that one does not promote or encourage in public.
Absolutely remarkable that folks in this thread appear to hate freedom so much that I can't even recommend freely-licensed Creative Commons content.
Not every country has signed the Berne Convention, and of those that have signed a number are only bound by the minimum copyright and IP laws of their own country rather than the maximum protections that other countries might hold to.
No one gets a trial with which a jury could even choose to nullify the charges.
When you act coy with this stuff, they sneak around subverting it to the point that it no longer works. Did you see what happened to OWS ten years back?
Even if at this point they are a bit too excessive in some cases.
it's arguable that they are responsible. They help incentivize sure (at least in theory), but would the counterfactual world, in which there's no IP laws, be just as progressive?
And that’s only content creation patents and protection of trade secrets is another matter.
Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong.
No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM.
IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing.
This notion that the author should control the means of distribution? It's a historical artifact of old technology when publishing literally meant printing presses, and setting up a competing printing press without the author's authorization was an expensive choice that was inherently, obviously a means to rip off the author.
IMO, every ISBN should have the author's bank account number next to it and obtaining a copy of the ebook should be as simple as sending $X to that bank account, then finding a torrent by ISBN.
which is fine, except what happens if the author sold the rights to another company that then demand a different set of condition?
Or are you saying that the owner of said copyright does not have the right to decide such (for example, they would want to decide that the works is only available as part of something else sold)?
I hear 30-year old overpaid software engineers brainstorming how to cheat the ticket checks at the ski resort. I watch people at all-you-can-eat buffets piling more food on than they can eat and bring something with them for consuming later at home or by their family. People discussing tax loopholes. Or how to get train rides for free if nobody checks the ticket. All well-off folks. Cheating their way through life. It's sickening.
It makes me wonder whether religion may actually be a (partial) solution to this. An atheist myself, I can see value in brainwashing people into believing that they are constantly being watched by an almighty being which will ensure they go to hell if they steal or similar, even if nobody else is watching.
It's really sad that people can't just be decent.
I kid, they are payday loan services for authors.
Now, arguably this has even worse consequences on culture than the banning of copying ebooks. Still, it complicates the expected cost of a book significantly, so replacing current copyright with your proposal would require some alternative for this case as well.
It's not though. It's the trademark that prevents that. Copyright only prevents them from making a Spiderman movie based on a story that's already been written. Nothing prevents them from writing a new story about a guy that shoots sticky goo from his wrists, and making a movie out of that.
I guess that story wouldn't be considered canon. But canon also has nothing to do with copyright.
The vast majority of reputable studies on software/music/games piracy have found that piracy boosts sales, and significantly. This is why you seldom see these studies, because the powers that be don't want you to know that.
A few breakout songs in the early 00s wouldn't have even made the top 100 if it weren't for limewire (laffy taffy being a prime example) and there were a number of artists at the time who intentionally capitalized on this.
So yes in 20 years when I settle down and write a book about the rust community and my wild ride through the startup world, I'll probably upload the torrents myself because I know it will boost sales.
Just like Adobe was caught doing back in the early 2000s (though if you try to google it now the news articles are mysteriously scrubbed from the internet). That's right, there is a good chance at least one of the Photoshop CS4 torrents you downloaded as a wee lad was uploaded by a marketing team at Adobe. They were caught red-handed doing this and it wasn't just some rogue employee.
And if you think about it, it was absolutely brilliant. The script kiddies grow up using pirated photoshop, get into a work situation where they or their company can actually afford it, and presto now you have a customer with a lifetime of lock-in to your ecosystem and guilt for not paying for it all these years.
Cool - what do the studies on books show? I mean it might boost sales, I can definitely see how it might, but just because things that are very different from books get their sales boosted does not mean that books do.
Thanks, I’m more than fine with torrenting, especially when digital copying is not stealing, it has no material consequence. If someone downloads content illegally they wouldn’t have bought either way, the net sum of knowledge/pleasure increases in the world.
Perhaps authors could explore more consumer friendly ways of distributing their work? You paint a false dichotomy.
I think I'd feel pretty great if I were a perpetual monopolist and rent seeker. As a child I never really developed the reality warping field necessary to believe I can own bits and numbers.
I'd feel frustrated, to say the least! That's why I think people who pirate should make an effort to buy the book if it's fairly recently published. It's usually not expensive.
However, for older books I think pirating is fine. Usually the authors have passed away.
I'd feel like I need to start publishing on a non-user-hostile platform and, having been a writer for most of my life AND having used Amazon for over a decade, wouldn't be upset at people pirating my work.
Perhaps if things continue this way, more and more authors will seek alternatives to Amazon Kindle and a new platform will emerge. Unlike video content, hosting for ebooks really wouldn't be that expensive. I think competition is viable in this area.
1. search for book on kindle
2. press buy
3. wait for book to download directly onto kindle
4. read book
I'm not using kindle to find books mind you, generally I already know what I'm after. I get almost all of my recommendations from friends too, it pays to know people who read even more than you do and have similar taste.
Hope that you didn't click a sketchy ad that looks just like the download link, because the site didn't police any of its ads.
Let's not kid ourselves- these site runners are not Aaron Swartz.
That only happens once. Maybe twice. Most people learn.
> piracy is almost always a service issue and not a pricing issue
If the price doesn't outweigh the benefits of the service, people will not use the service.
Tap the share button to email the book to your Kindle email address.
If the Kindle has wifi on, the book automatically appears under another 10 seconds.
The whole process takes less than 30 seconds.
I buy Kindles specifically for this feature of being able to mail EPUBs to Kindle. When or if it is no longer possible, I stop buying Kindles.
https://www.reddit.com/r/zlibrary is full of warnings about scam websites.
My point is it's hardly easier, let alone safe, compared to Amazon.
Edit: Is it this? https://go-to-zlibrary.se/#telegram_bot_tab. Seems a bit risky, given the trail it creates vs anonymous downloads from some tor site.
I use ZLib since before it was popular. So there was near zero risks of scam sites.
Compared to a WisperNet download, that's actually a bit of a faff. Don't get me wrong, I use a hacked Kobo, but getting the books on the thing requires a computer and either to use a micro-USB cable or faffing about with a fileshare and WebDAV.
Kindle: attach book to Kindle email address, send.
I like to image, that jeff bezos dies a little inside whenever I do this.
It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally.
The other flow is buy book. Go to kindle, "sync and check for new items". But again, it's a kids book, don't want to pull your copy of "catcher in the rye" to their device accidentally.
edit: common question: what's a computer... it's a dying concept where you own the machine you bought instead of rent it, typically consisting of an open source os distribution, and the manufacturer doesn't take 30% of all transactions taking place on that hardware.
edit: I want to buy it on my phone: would you be ok paying 30% more than on a pc? Amazon doesn't think so. And giving 30% cut to apple / google would end up with amazon paying apple to sell the book. At that point why ?
Microsoft was fined billions of dollars and went through years of litigation over something much less egregious.
Apple's (And Google's) digital tax is what you should be mad at.
I feel that you are being unreasonable: you willingly bought into a closed ecosystem, and now you're mad that other people are not part of that ecosystem.
What did you expect?
Anything that requires active involvement waits until I am in front of a PC.
Mobile UIs are just insufficient for most activities.
What's a computer? /s
Thanks, I wouldn't have noticed
If you go to some authors discord and make small donation (often half of Amazon's price), they'll send you drm-free ebooks. That's what you should do if you really want to support author and dislike markup from marketplace monopolies.
It's just a book. I'd hope most parents would rejoice if their kid read well enough to get through that, or Mein Kamp.
And yes, as a parent it's part of my job, and my right, to pick and choose what I think my kid is ready for.
No offense taken - I'm not sure why you think that.
I suppose people do want to limit what books children read - I still think that's generally misguided - but your points on people actually wanting parental controls are well made.
I still think parents would be better off celebrating reading comprehension than censoring books (Now discussing books with your child is a different matter).
At any rate I guess the prevalence of trash/spam on Amazon is higher than your average library - so there's that...
What you were doing isn't "buying" anything, Amazon has on more than one occasion deleted books off of devices after they had been purchased.
On the subject of children's book, a few weeks ago I checked to see if there were retail versions of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books (there were, for Kindle!). Turns out, none of the "turn to page X" instructions are links, but also none of the pages have the original page numbers. $8/each, and you can't get a refund. The Amazon pages are full of 1-star reviews of people bitching about it.
As someone who enjoys reading on my Kindle and as an early Audible customer, the crap in app browsing and purchasing experience was one of the reasons I put off having an iPhone.
After years of complaints, now at least in app Audible books browsing and purchasing works on iPhone, sigh ...
Now having an iPhone, I have simply traded one set of bad experiences for another, as currently the set of bad experiences on an iPhone, is less important than the on an Android.
Perhaps a real book on real paper is an alternative?
The iPad is still an atrocious experience. I cannot tell if I'm simply aging out of being able to figure out new technology, or if none of the product managers at Apple have young children. But it's marginally better than the Kindle, and it runs Roblox.
Apple really want that 30% cut.
Stuff like your experience with Amazon, mine even just last night having to: find where I can buy something I want to stream (already a nightmare), buying it on the "new" Google TV app only to cast to the TV before playing it and getting "this content cannot be played on your TV", before starting it playing on my phone first and _then_ casting, after which it worked.
Here’s another mini-anecdote. On my iphone I have Amazon Prime app where it allows me to download episodes of Peppa Pig for my daughter to watch when we don’t have internet. Recently I wanted to cast these episodes on an AppleTV hooked up to a big TV in a hotel. It wouldn’t let me - because you are not allowed to use Screen Mirroring to show protected content, and AppleTV was connected to WiFi, but not internet - so it couldn’t verify licenses.
So bottom line - here I have content that I paid for, stored inside a protected from ground-up encrypted mainstream device, but I can’t play it on large TV in the same room, because “what if i somehow got around it being licensed!”.
All of this feels insane to me, especially being rather familia with constant slogans coming from Amazon and Apple about their customer-focused philosophies.
A child’s account can’t buy books - you have to do it for them.
1. I open Amazon app on my iphone and find the book - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”.
2. I open Kindle app on my iphone and find the book there - “This app does not support purchasing of this content”.
3. Turns out - you can only buy a book by opening a web version of Amazon in Safari on the iphone. I open up Safari, go to Amazon, dodge and dismiss repeated prompts to open the Amazon app, find the book - it says “Kindle”, it says “Available instantly”, it says “$2.99”, but there’s no “Buy” button. Instead - “The Kindle title is not currently available for purchase.”
4. I find another book, I buy it. Now I need to find how to share it with my kid.
5. I open app Kindle app on my iphone, click on the book expecting some kind of “share” - nope, nowhere I look am I able to find share functionality in the app.
6. I google “how to share your kindle book with child account”, here’s the answer I get: “ On the Amazon webpage, click “Account and Lists”, then click “Manage content and devices” in the “Digital content and devices section of the page”. On the “Digital Content” page, click “Books”.
Delightful experience.