You aren't actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon's Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post doesn't display any ignorance of the points you are making - instead, he acknowledges them but makes the entirely valid point that charging several dollars for a "delivery fee" of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!

There is a huge disconnect between the attitude of "any price that people will pay is a fair price" and the fact that economic systems require that parties engage in transactions in good faith. To me, it seems blatantly obvious that Amazon is engaging in the bad-faith practice of trying to conceal the true costs of their service by loading a lot of the price into a "delivery charge" that is absurd.

This kind of thing is a very old game in business, but that doesn't make it ok. Just because something is common and legal doesn't make it appropriate. A large amount of standard business practices are deliberate, but legal, rip-offs - and calling a rip-off a rip-off is a good thing.

Do you think that the largest file sharing service (S3) and the largest public cloud computing infrastructure (EC2) in the world just operate for free? Digital delivery fees help pay for the millions in hardware, software, infrastructure and maintenance costs for these services, which Kindle uses extensively.

Amazon's "delivery fee" is 15 cents/megabyte. By comparison, AT&T's most expensive pay-as-you-go data plan is $15 for 250MB, or 6 c/MB, less than half the price. Their cheapest plan is 1 cent/MB.

Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it's very clear to me that they're just taking a huge margin here.

It's also worth noting that his book is large compared to your average novel. He clocks in around 17.6 megabytes, whereas even a giant novel like Game Of Thrones is only 3.3 megabytes. Hunger Games is a paltry 0.5 megabytes.

Then be very careful you never accidentally do that when on international roaming (which 3G Kindles do have). You could easily end up being charged $250. And no, that is not an exaggeration (there have been much worse cases).

Amazon also has a pretty good track record at lowering costs when their costs go down (at least when looking at AWS), so it wouldn't surprise me to see the delivery fees dropping over time as they negotiate better deals with AT&T or if they start working directly with other mobile operators in other countries.

Exactly. They are trying to run a for-profit business. The T&C for data charges is clearly laid out in a simple table I found within 30 seconds of Googling. I'm not sure where the expectation of charity comes from that they shouldn't be making a profit, you don't have to use Amazon or Kindle if you don't want to. Do you think the new Macbook Pro costs Apple $2200 to make?

So... are we morally barred from complaining, or is it merely to be considered gauche?

(This reminds me of the people whose entire conception of "Free Speech" is "I can say anything and if you criticize that's an infringement of my rights.")

If you are willing to pay, saying they are charging too much is just wishful thinking.

In a more competitive, transparent market, I would think others could exploit such dissatisfaction.

If I downloaded an 18MB email attachment over 3g on my phone, while in the US, it will cost me $315.

I think it is disingenuous to assume that $2.58 is some number pulled out of the air to rip the author off. The current meme right now is to assume all digital content delivery is essentially 'free', but this is untrue.

So Amazon is charging 237% of the ridiculous rate AT&T uses to try to force people to upgrade to a higher plan.

And that's despite the cost that most Kindle users (I'm guessing over 90%) get their books through their computer or WiFi, and don't accrue any cellular charges.

Plus... this is Amazon. I'm pretty sure that given the amount of data Kindles may use they would have been able to get a better deal out of AT&T than your average individual consumer.

And again, this is all on top of the 30% they take that should already cover all of this.

https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...

I love my Kindle and I really like Amazon, but this is the first I've heard of the delivery charge part. Considering that it's around 25% of the price of the book... it really does seem like a rip off on their part.

Maybe it has something to do with the book it's self (i.e. they charge $0.07 per image), but do they mention how this is calculated anywhere?

If I sell an ebook for $2, they take $0.60 in general, and then they decide that it costs $0.80 to deliver... that means they're taking 70% of the cost of the book. So if I'm successful and have to pay taxes, I may be making like $0.12 per book.

I don't remember every seeing this cost mentioned before in the few articles I've seen about selling Kindle books. I'd love to know how it's calculated.

A few notes. A high % of the KS money went into rewards (books printed averaged $20 shipped).

I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue.

Biggest tl;dr complaint is that as an avid reader of about a book a week I had no idea that authors paid both 30% of the total price plus the delivery fee. The other main competitors don't do this... just found it odd and wrote about it.

"I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue."

Not nearly as many people know about Gumroad or use it, so for any given marketplace, some percentage of the buyers in that marketplace are potential customers but they are stubbornly proportional. If Gumroad has 10% of the customers that Amazon has and you get 2x the revenue per book sold, you will only see an increase proportional to 10% of the sales at Amazon. As a worked example

219 Amazon customers $5.10 per book -> $1117 in revenue 22 Gumroad customers $9.25 per book -> $209 in revenue

It's the area under the curve that is important. In a traditional publishing arrangement you would give a bigger 'discount' to a big seller (say Barnes and Noble) vs a boutique seller like 'World Books'. One has 10,000 stores, the other 4 stores. Because while you get less per book, you sell more books and make more overall (price * volume, not just price).

So I seriously doubt you would even have matched the Amazon revenue, if you had gone through Gumroad and precluded Amazon.

So when you look at it you need to sum all of the sales, and all of the margins, and you will get your 'average selling price' or ASP. This will help you understand how much you can profitably 'invest' in putting together a book. As your reputation grows, if you garner an audience, then you can 'count' on more total revenue per book and take some of the guesswork out of the planning.

The other part of the equation is time, since it takes a while for people to get the book and recommend it, there can be several months of 'growth' before you really know what the market for your book is.

I totally understand that you were surprised had the additional charges that Amazon specified but didn't make clear (and that Apple does a better job of this I think is a good thing since they are the competition). Unfortunately PDF is a horrible book format as it pre-computes for a given render and that means that it looks like crap on readers that don't fit the mold. Epub is much better, as is mobi. For what its worth the last time I was looking through the Writers Guide (one of my daughters is looking to creative writing as a career) selling 1500 travel books if you weren't Michelen or Fodor's was a 'big' title, so selling 300 pretty much right off the bat is huge. I wish you great success!

I think the real issue is less about costs and more about how Amazon hides big revenues behind "delivery fees." Most platforms (Apple, Google, PayPal, even Amazon in the AWS world) that take a percentage cut + special fees separate the special fees to mirror actual costs (e.g. credit card processing). In this case Amazon just used it as another place to add significant markup, presumably in a way that was not expected.

Should he have read the contract more closely? Yeah, no question. But it still strikes me as sleazy on Amazon's part, even though I agree with you that a lot of what he did was only possible because of what Amazon's done.

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...

Otherwise you could have lazy publishers using high resolution images out of sheer laziness and not caring since it wouldn't cost them anything extra.

So yes, this rant is pretty pointless. This is the way every marketplace works nowadays: iTunes or Themeforest are the same. They take a big cut and reinvest the profits in marketing and advertising to grow the marketplace larger (and thus generate more profits for you in the long run).

Edit: also, amazon grants themselves MFN status [1] at the authors' expense. So they exploit their market size to make sure authors can't make up for the kindle being nearly 100% more expensive than competitors.

   By "price-match" we mean where we sell the Digital Book in one
   or more of the Available Sales Territories at a price (net of
   taxes) that is below the List Price to match a third party's sales
   price for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book, or
   to match our sales price for any physical edition of the Digital
   Book, in any one of the Available Sales Territories.

Amazon charging 30%, then another $2.50 is sketchy, why not just charge 50%, or at least avertise the price as a fixed $2.50 plus 30%? Questionable on Amazons part, without a doubt.