I have a hard time getting behind some of these criticisms of audible and the like.
Its annoying, as I am against most DRM schemes out there. But to pretend those came from "big tech" is laughable, at best. A ridiculously large portion of "tech" is perfectly fine with sending copies everywhere. Is literally how many of us get our operating system. Music files and shareware copying were huge before the internet. Mod files and other demoscene music sharing was a ton of fun.
Specifically to audible, to complain about their margins without acknowledging that they have built a large part of the market feels dishonest. I remember audio books before audible. Usually ~50 bucks for book. As such, I owned maybe 1. So, congrats, the folks on them could get more of a percent of far far fewer purchases. Getting things for lower cost is exactly why I get more of them. Such that artists have gotten more from me, even with the lower margin to them, from audible than they ever got before. Wanting the same large cut of a smaller sell is entitlement on both ends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> But to pretend those came from "big tech" is laughable, at best.
I'm curious about how old you are. Tech's obsession with DRM (then called "copy protection") started in 1975¹, and IIRC as of the late 70s/early 80s basically all software of note had DRM.
It is vitally important not to conflate technologists with the tech industry and not to confuse a criticism of the industry as a criticism of ourselves personally.
Work at a place that made expensive physical objects. Customers calling in because they could use the objects because they plugged the hardware key into a different machine was all the time ...
Like the hardware had to be wired to the computer running the software. An extra hardware key that needs to be plugged into the computer as well doesn't do anything!
Make hardware keys that have the shape of real keys, and that you have to turn to engage the USB key.
The key shape isn't security, just a hint at what needs to plug where. You sell both keys and receptacles that can be put into a metal case or an otter box
This is basically what a security key (e.g., yubikey) is? I'm actually surprised I can't get a door lock that can be opened by one, yet. Could even be NFC capable, so that you don't have to plug in anything.
Similarly, this is effectively what many car keys are, nowadays.
Creators as well. Talk to anyone who works in a creative field that isn't programming. They want DRM. They love it. And the reason why is simple: DRM works. It does the job. It doesn't stop all piracy, but it greatly attenuates it allowing the creators to make a buck. I remember discussing this with a writing group in the 90s, when the first e-readers came out. They vastly preferred the DRM-encumbered platforms because they could make money with lower risk of piracy.
And this is why DRM will never go away. Take DRM away, and creators will just stop releasing things digitally. Programmers in general need to learn to suck it up when it comes to things like this. Without DRM, pirates win, creators lose, legitimate audiences lose.
> Take DRM away, and creators will just stop releasing things digitally.
Is that guaranteed?
Album sales rarely made money for musicians; they made their money from live performances and merchandise. Plenty of musicians have released their music online as MP3s to drive folks to their concerts.
And long before DRM, we used to record things off the radio.
It's easier than ever to share music but instead people pay monthly subscription fees to streaming services.
Folks will pay for convenience. A lot of "piracy" was driven by an inability to get something _at all_ or only at an absurd price. And despite the protestations of the music and movie industries (both with long records of screwing over the artists), it's unlikely that "piracy" cause much financial loss.
In the 90s I really wanted this one song by REM. I can’t even remember what it was. The band had just rounded out their deal with one record label and moved to another, and the old label closed out the deal with a “greatest hits” record from everything up and including Document, I think.
That CD cost me $16. That’s $30 today. For an hour of music. Record label culture reeks of greed.
Before Napster they definitely did. The saying is that you used to tour to promote the album, now you make the album to promote the tour. Artists have always been last in line to get paid, but there was much, much more money in it before 2000.
Anyone who works with music software, to this day, deals with the pain of physical hardware keys. A few of the software players are moving from that to cloud based drm… which is at least less annoying since it doesn’t tie up a previous USB port.
This is largely a point I can fully get behind. All streaming services with their "exclusives" are doing this, though. :( It is very frustrating.
Disney famously has their "vault" that basically means you can only get physical copies when they deem it worthy to resell something. Relevant for libraries as they are bound by the same limitations, at that point.
Right, but that was my point on the numbers. As a customer that has several hundred audio books due to Audible, yes, I know that the authors get a smaller cut of the sell than they do if I buy the audio book in a store. But their larger cut of my store purchases is effectively 0. Audible has grown the market to numbers that were basically pipe dreams of the past. To ignore that in the calculation is really dishonest.
I don't know if they are the best numbers, but https://wordsrated.com/audiobook-sales-statistics/ has some break downs. The digital market has clearly seen a shift in the last couple of decades. And it seems safe to say that it has driven a lot of the growth in publishing and other related metrics.
My assertion is that publishers used to give higher cuts to the authors because they didn't care about such a small portion of their sales. More, their long term investments in printing made it such that they couldn't scale out audio books nearly as effectively, so they had no incentive to build out that market.
Even dumber in this debate, the fact that Audible puts their files in DRM is almost certainly at the demands of the publishers. You can click through most publishers to see they still want to charge 25+ for audio books that you can get for 1 "credit" on Audible. Credits being about 11 bucks, and I get why publishers would want to keep those files restricted to try and discourage people from using Audible.
My problem isn't just with the royalty rates, it's making the default rate so low and using it as leverage to push authors into exclusivity contracts.
Imagine if Apple started telling companies "You have to pay us a 60% cut, unless you agree to not have an Android app in which case we'll do 30% instead."
You could argue that Apple is entitled to make that arrangement because they essentially created the mobile app software market, but I have a hard time imagining that people would be OK with it.
But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?
I'm very sympathetic to all of these concerns, at large. However, as things are done, many authors will make the most money by agreeing to this contract, and customers get the cheapest option there. The only people actually getting hurt, right now, are the other platforms. To paint this in any other way is not at all honest. And that is the part that is annoying me.
There is also a moral hazard "they will switch some day" argument to be made, i suppose. But I don't like hinging current practices on future hypotheticals. Making a choice today should be possible with the understanding that you can make a different choice in the future.
So you can show that authors are getting less money in this environment? And, despite me being able to trivially show that I paid less per book than any offered alternative on the table, with the exception of the library, you claim I'm getting a raw deal now? We can even add in performers and others doing the recording to this question.
Obviously, I only have the numbers on what I paid out. If you actually have the others, I'm game to hear what those numbers are. And no, you can't just say, "they would have gotten a larger cut in the other marketplaces," as I am literally asserting that Audible is the largest marketplace because they grew it. A smaller cut of the much larger marketplace is the point. (And in real terms, the cut is smaller for Audible, too.)
It is funny looking at the benefit of libraries to customers, as guess who is also trying to kill library's ability to loan out audio books? (They already have to do some silly license purchase shenanigans.)
Again, if you are worried that they will "turn bad in the future," realize that I can change my mind in the future and agree they are bad. Right now, most evidence is that they are instrumental in growing the market.
>And no, you can't just say, "they would have gotten a larger cut in the other marketplaces," as I am literally asserting that Audible is the largest marketplace because they grew it
Ma Bell was the largest telecom because they grew the industry. That doesn't mean their actions once they had monopoly power in a large market were particularly beneficial to anyone but themselves.
>Again, if you are worried that they will "turn bad in the future,"
No, they already did. Their actions now are bad. Exclusivity deals are bad. Their enormous cut is bad.
So you can't show that customers pay more, or that authors and performers get less? Got it.
Appeals to "Ma Bell" are basically my point? If it is shown that they are using their advantages in audio books to compete in other markets, or that they are causing active harm to customers/creators, then I will be far more sympathetic to the whining of rich creators.
It is frustrating, as I mostly agree with the idea that exclusive deals are bad. But this is a very nuanced take where they aren't forcing you to be exclusive, unless they literally funded and produced it. (See Sandman on Audible. I'd expect that to be exclusive for at least a time?) If you can show coercion that they are forcing people into this deal, and not honestly saying "if you agree to this, you will sell about the same total amount, and get more of the cut," I will be more than willing to change my mind on that.
Yes. This is the modern anti-trust loophole. Same thing Google does with "our products are free so we can't be a monopoly".
If every party wins then the only drawback is that the market evaporates and you end up with monoculture. Not a big deal unless the single player turns "bad" and starts abusing their position. Even if customers flee it would take a decade to regrow the free market.
And there's a huge buffer allowance for just being "a little bad". Like, "oops, sorry about that author/candidate that we crushed on accident, we've made a tweak to the algorithm and it won't happen again" but the damage is done.
I think a lot of people know that today it's a win-win but are just afraid what these companies _might_ do.
It is this odd debate on what companies "might do" that is so annoying to me. Don't paint what they are currently doing, today, as if they are already doing the future thing.
More, don't pretend like them doing something they are almost certainly legally bound to do because of the other big actors is their fault. Lobby to change rules, but realize that if you kill the newcomer to the market, you are likely setting up the old guard to take back over. And they are almost certainly going to do what they always do.
>But is your worry for the authors, for other platforms, or for customers?
All of the above.
Don't take this as a slam, but given your responses in this thread, it's probably a good idea to get a primer about how anticompetitive practices work.
The meaningful difference between these two examples is that Apple is a gatekeeper to the iOS market.
Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does. Nobody can publish an app to the iOS App Store without going through Apple (and Apple doesn't allow alternative app stores or sideloading for consumers).
You're of course technically right, but I would argue that in practice Audible is also a gatekeeper due to their dominant and successful position (though of course to a lesser degree than Apple). I have family members and friends that will not even consider buying an audiobook if it's not on Audible. That's a testament to Audible's good work at making a good platform, and I believe Audible deserves to be in the position they are in. But, I do think they have effective gatekeeper status, and a lot of that is a result of their exclusivity practices. By ensuring that there can't be any other audiobook store out there that has all the books a person wants, and that you can't sideload a book into your Audible library that you purchased elsewhere, they force a high level of inconvenience on anybody who wants to buy a book somewhere else.
> Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does.
That's like saying anybody can sell iOS apps outside of App Store. Yes, it's technically true¹ (the best kind), but effectively there's no real alternative, and Amazon knows this and treats creators accordingly².
> Anybody can spin up a website hosting .mp3s like Audible does.
Sure, but audiobook publishers won't be there because of their exclusivity requirement with Audible, and they won't drop the exclusivity requirement because Audible has all the market share, and so the website never grows to compete.
Once Amazon figured this out with the Kindle and started pushing exclusivity there, books very quickly started disappearing from other online stores.
The flip-side of this is that any author that doesn't agree to exclusivity is just leaving money on the table, because audiobook buyers will not touch alternative platforms unless it's their only option.
This isn't because Audible is head-and-shoulders above the competition either. They aren't. They just won the game of Monopoly[0].
[0] Someone should turn on house rules. Or - oooh maybe we could play the unused co-op mode
I am curious why you don't think they aren't better than the alternatives? Are they amazing and beyond improvement? Of course not. But most of the alternatives are crap.
This is basically the same as the sad affair of enterprise software. The vast majority of that industry is actively bad. Not just not good, but actively bad.
>I am curious why you don't think they aren't better than the alternatives? Are they amazing and beyond improvement? Of course not. But most of the alternatives are crap.
Do you think the quality of the alternatives might be related to the fact that Amazon/Audible is strangling all competitors out of existence with their exclusivity agreements?
Imagine if an audiobook competitor popped up that's a 10x better experience for customers and authors. They'd starve out of existence without major VC backing because even though they're better, they can't bring the sales volume that Audible can, so customers choose the worse experience on Audible with the exclusivity agreement because the total earnings are higher.
Long-term, that's a worse ecosystem for everyone except for Audible.
No. I think the quality of the alternatives is largely because it is expensive to make the publishing houses happy with licensing fees to be able to offer their work.
This isn't even that controversial of a take. Netflix doesn't offer a ton of the things I used to be able to get in DVD from them, because the publishing houses have very high demands on licensing fees.
If apple extended itunes to sell audiobooks, they'd eat audible's lunch without problem. Any podcasting company could do it, because podcasts basically are audiobooks
(Also disclaimer, I work at Amazon but not at audible)
Depending on what you are looking for from an audio book, there are options. If you expect essentially a professionally made radio production of the book (multiple voice actors, effects, etc) then a real audio book is hard to beat.
On the other hand if you just want to listen to the book being read, check out https://github.com/aedocw/epub2tts ... It does not sound as good as a pro human, but it's not far off in my opinion. I've used that to listen to 30+ books that I owned the digital version of.
I actually have a few narrators that I prefer now. I think they get less of a cut than the authors do, but are still doing quite well for themselves, now.
I actually think Audible is pretty good. I would feel better about buying from them if it wasn’t fully owned by Amazon. Are there any good alternatives out there?
libro.fm is an option for buying books. You can purchase a subscription or buy individual books. Some of the money goes to support local bookstores, so that's kind of neat. They're also not Amazon, so that's kind of neat, too.
I'm a big fan of the Libby app, which you can acccess through your local library. If your library subscribes to the service (and it's likely they do if you live in the USA), then you just need to log in with your library card.
https://libbyapp.com
There's also LibriVox, which is mostly a volunteer project. As its volunteers, the quality of the reading can vary widely, but you can sometimes find audio versions of older literature here that can't be found anywhere else. It's also free.
Just because a library subscribes to libby doesn’t mean you nessesarily get it. My local system does, but they went for cheapest plan that only includes children’s books.
libro.fm is the website I use for audiobooks. The library is signficantly smaller but it's 100% DRM free, you can support a local bookstore with your purchases [1], and they have a subscription that gives you credits you can spend on audiobooks, very similar to Audible.
I read it. I confess I'm largely remembering previous articles that loved highlighting the amount of margin that Audible demands.
For the DRM complaint, I'm mostly sympathetic, but I have a really hard time believing it is not at the insistence of the publishing companies. They literally force library lending to go through similar DRM schemes. And it is largely in their interests to make sure you can't purchase the cheaper Audible version of a book and take it out of their ecosystem.
That last point is ultimately my main gripe here. Audible has incentives for you to buy more from them. Which they largely pursue not by locking your current purchases to them, but by offering better prices and funding better books. To try and "stick it to the man" by bitching about DRM schemes is a hell of a non-sequitur that smacks more of virtue signalling than it does actual concerns.
I find it really hard to deny that platform lock-in is a powerful anti-competitive and anti-consumer force - I think you’re off base in denying its impacts and the merits of addressing it.
I largely agree with this take. But I also largely feel I'm being asked to support, who, exactly?
Note that we aren't pushing for removing the DRM. This is largely about someone wanting you to buy from another place. I can almost believe the DRM angle, but publishing houses have shown they are the far larger driver of that than Audible is. This is why libraries have to have a special license to loan out audio books. They are largely looking to force that in ebooks, even.
As for the last point, that one is not about Audible, so... what are we even discussing here? The article last argument, which is after discussing DRM and monopolies where users are captured into a locked market, is that google and apple has a 30% tax. They don't go into any depth over why a general 30% tax in a third-party market is bad in a duopoly situation, presumably because they don't feel it is necessary.
I've seen complaints on Audible for a few years, at this point? Surprised if this is news to you. Though, I also wouldn't be too shocked if folks skip past audio book news that don't listen to audio books.
What do you mean the point wasn't on Audible, btw? The article is literally about how he is proud he isn't putting his book with Audible because of DRM? This is painted as if it is a choice of Amazon's, but it is hard not to read this as a choice of the Doctorow's. Perhaps you thought I was referencing someone else's last point? I meant that as a reference to my last point in the previous paragraph.
Well, the root article was changed on us. But, yeah, Doctorow and Sanderson both have had pretty high profile critiques of Audible? I don't keep a full index on the official lines, but summary is largely that "DRM bad" and "they give a smaller percentage to authors."
And, at large, I don't care for either of those things. I agree that DRM blows. I also would love it if writers and narrators and SFX crews and everyone got more money. I have grown to not trust a lot of the "big tech company is root of all problems in this old rotting industry" story.
Its annoying, as I am against most DRM schemes out there. But to pretend those came from "big tech" is laughable, at best. A ridiculously large portion of "tech" is perfectly fine with sending copies everywhere. Is literally how many of us get our operating system. Music files and shareware copying were huge before the internet. Mod files and other demoscene music sharing was a ton of fun.
Specifically to audible, to complain about their margins without acknowledging that they have built a large part of the market feels dishonest. I remember audio books before audible. Usually ~50 bucks for book. As such, I owned maybe 1. So, congrats, the folks on them could get more of a percent of far far fewer purchases. Getting things for lower cost is exactly why I get more of them. Such that artists have gotten more from me, even with the lower margin to them, from audible than they ever got before. Wanting the same large cut of a smaller sell is entitlement on both ends.