
Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away - rpledge
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/
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wccrawford
Amazon should own up and pay. They have effectively stolen from this author.
No, we can't guarantee that those people would have bought it for free, but if
these were physical books, the law would require that they pay the author.

The agreement wasn't that they get to change the price any time they like. The
agreement was that they get to match competitors. They violated that.

~~~
toyg
"If these were physical books", there would be a material loss involved:
Publisher A paid to produce X books, the distributor lost part of them, and
now the Publisher cannot sell them anymore, suffering a direct and
quantifiable economic loss.

Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library, and
some people got to read them for free. The publisher can still sell them.
There is no direct loss, the damage is hardly quantifiable (it might actually
turn out to be a net positive in the end, given all this free publicity).

The digital world is funny like that.

EDIT: this is not to say that Amazon shouldn't be held accountable for their
mistake, if there is a breach of contract involved; just that it doesn't
matter whether there were 6000 downloads or 60.

~~~
danssig
>Here, it's more like the distributor left their books around in a library,
and some people got to read them for free.

I would say it's more like some people walked out of the library with them.
The author most certainly did lose something: sales.

~~~
cbr
> The author most certainly did lose something: sales.

But they didn't lose 6000 sales, they lost however many sales they would have
made at $6. So it's tricky to quantify the damages.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's tricky to figure out the damage, yes, but I think an award of sales times
normal royalties would be fair here. If the RIAA went for the number of whole
copies distributed times normal sale price times three in their lawsuits I
wouldn't find them to be a terrible organization.

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mindstab
Big business vs the little guy is extremely unfair these days. If I had given
away 6000 free mp3s or movies via a P2P system you can bet they'd try me in
court for the full price of them all, but in this article already they are
equivocating saying "oh but they were free, less people would have paid for it
so he can't realistically ask for all the money for all the copies we gave
away".

How come when a big company gets "ripped off" they can charge far more than
the retail price for every copy but when the actual creator gets ripped off he
gets nothing and people equivocate on even the numbers?

~~~
bad_user
I thought HN was good at math:

    
    
         lim(number_of_lawyers) = 0 USD payed
         1 -> infinite

~~~
211231321
make it _0USD payed to others_ , you still have to give salary to the legal
department.

~~~
seunosewa
Lawyers always win.

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Pahalial
I think the real story here is that he chose the 35% royalty rate over the 70%
rate “because you can opt out of Kindle Lending.”

I understand that some people view disabling that feature as less of an anti-
customer move than I do, but to hate it enough to waive half your royalties?

~~~
211231321
Yeah, and the lending feature is good and would actually result in good
marketing.

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mark_l_watson
I am surprised that Amazon didn't pay him a small token payment, perhaps a
couple of thousand dollars.

In the past Amazon has given me two grants for free AWS usage ($1000 and $300)
so I personally consider them to be generous, for a corporation. I would bet
that no one with real authority at Amazon reviewed this case because if they
had, I think they would have made a small good-will payment.

~~~
alttag
If it does go to court, a goodwill payment might be interpreted as evidence of
wrongdoing.

In your case, the marginal cost to Amazon of providing AWS was negligible, and
Amazon has full rights to offer products they create as freebies, so such
grants easily translate to goodwill. In this case, Amazon doesn't own all
rights to the product, so it's a bit more murky. It would be as if Amazon was
granting you freebies but were only resellers rather than providers of AWS,
and didn't compensate the actual provider.

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rick888
It's funny how amazon won't pay for their mistakes, yet sellers in their
marketplace are kicked off for much less. If you have over a 1% failure rate,
you are warned. If it continues, your account is put on hold and you might
even be kicked off permanently. Failure can be a return, refund, or bad
feedback (it doesn't matter why).

If a customer says they didn't receive a package and file an A-Z claim, they
win 99% of the time, even when the seller has proof of delivery.

I understand that we don't want bad sellers ripping people off, but Amazon
should at least hold themselves to the same standards.

They also can't really seem to get their act together. In the past 6 months,
every time they make a change to their system, sellers lose orders for weeks.
Amazon won't ever admit this of course, but as a seller, I can't chock it up
to a coincidence anymore.

It really makes me wonder what kind of code base they are working with.

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peteysd
I think that Amazon should probably admit the error and pay the guy. However,
the publicity that the author is now receiving over this is probably worth far
more than the price of 6,000 books.

In the end, he'll probably be secretly thanking Amazon for allowing him to
rise above obscurity.

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ck2
Who sells in a marketplace where someone else sets your price for you
automatically without your approval?

Amazon isn't a distributor in this case any more than the person who owns the
tent at a fleamarket allows people to sell underneath it.

In any case, Amazon's automatic algorithm to save themselves money from having
to pay humans to do it nipped them this time and they owe the author. Do the
right thing and settle Amazon. Take it out of the programmer's pay if
necessary - better yet their manager who was supposed to review the code
before it executed.

~~~
illumen
'Who sells in a marketplace where someone else sets your price for you
automatically without your approval?'

Most people who sell products do. You sell at your wholesale price, and the
retailer sets the retail price.

~~~
_delirium
True, but the tricky part here is that Amazon got to set the wholesale price,
too. Larger publishers have negotiated fixed wholesale prices (against
Amazon's attempt to push back), but self-published eBook authors get a
percentage of the retail price, so when Amazon varies the retail price, the
wholesale price varies accordingly.

~~~
feralchimp
(To split a maybe-relevant hair) in a purely royalty-based resale model, with
no pre-negotiated minimums, there is no wholesale price. There is only the
retail price, and revenue flow per the royalty calculation.

Amazon clearly believes: \- the cost/benefit for this guy to sue doesn't work
out in his favor \- no (or an insignificant number of) other authors will pull
their content in an attempt to negotiate a change in the contract terms

Sucks.

------
MattBearman
I think Amazon should be made to pay something, although maybe not the full
$13k, simply to make damn sure that they sort out their systems and this
doesn't happen again.

If Amazon gets off lightly they probably won't change anything, and this could
happen to some other unsuspecting author.

~~~
roc
> _"this could happen to some other unsuspecting author."_

Not to mention the now-clear potential for malicious activity that this
process illustrates: If one wanted to cause trouble for an author, apparently
they could just post three chapters of a book to the Nook store at $0 and
watch the target author's Kindle revenue drop to zero.

Amazon's incentive is clearly to err on the side of price drops --
particularly if they suffer no serious legal/PR damage from false-positives.

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mquinlan
For the sales of Crawford's book to go from 6 (/day?) to 5,000+ makes me
question how many of those aren't really fans and are just readers because it
was an impulse "buy". At least he maintained his 4.5 star rating even with the
flood of downloads.

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Tichy
Can't they delete the free copies from the kindle devices? Not that I really
like that, but that seems to be the use case for that feature.

~~~
ianferrel
The last time they did that, there was a huge upswelling of discontent,
several lawsuits (which went nowhere, I believe), and they stated specifically
that they would not do so again.

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jxcole
Am I the only one who read this and though, well that's sad for the author,
but isn't Amazon asking for too much in general? I mean, we're talking about
e-books. I imagine I could probably make an online bookstore that sells ebooks
and gives the author 75% of the selling price. Amazon is taking $5.99 and
offering him 35 or 70 cents. I fail to see how it could remain in business
with the relative ease with which you could make a competitor.

~~~
dminor
They're offering 35% or 70%, not 35 or 70 cents.

~~~
jobu
35% is a terrible rate for an ebook.

You can only get %70 if you charge more than $2.99 and opt-in to Kindle
Lending. Does that mean that authors don't get anything for books read through
Kindle Lending? That seems terrible if true. Kindle Lending is the reason I
finally signed up for Amazon Prime, and I would expect authors to get a cut of
that revenue.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Authors get nothing for books lent through the library and people have been OK
with that for a long time. A book still has to be purchased.

~~~
alttag
Libraries purchase physical copies of books (often at higher prices to get a
sturdier binding). For popular books, libraries purchase multiple copies, some
of which get lost or damaged, and must be replaced. In other words,authors
still see some income from libraries.

With Kindle Lending, there is no substantive gain for authors.

~~~
dminor
Presumably one must buy the book before it can be lent. People may ascribe a
higher value to a lendable book, or be more likely to purchase in the first
place.

~~~
alttag
Not as part of the Kindle Lending library available to Prime users, no.

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leerpm
There may be a start-up idea here: an application to allow authors to easily
monitor changes to their ebook prices?

~~~
threepointone
Sounds more like a feature in a bigger app, but yes, I agree with you. There's
something there.

~~~
211231321
The app should be able to easily post your book to most major ebook markets.

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hxa7241
The book appears to have been on sale for about 2 weeks, during which time 6
copies were sold through Amazon. So that is about 3 sales per week (from
Amazon).

One would expect that this publicity will do a lot more for profits than the
'lost sales' would have.

~~~
jgroome
Where did you read it had only sold six copies previously?

~~~
hxa7241
Sales figure from author's blog, publish-date from book-store pages.

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marisela_arias
The problem is that Amazon doesn't want to set a precedent by paying him. They
want to be able make these mistakes in the future and be free to screw over
another author without any previous settlement mucking things up.

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delinka
Being the tech dude that I am, had I decided to write a book and do this I
think (perhaps - hindsight and all that) I would have changed the title
slightly to prevent the automatons from causing such a problem. Akin to how
Apple's App Store policies recommend naming the free version of your app
differently from the paid version.

~~~
castewart
It's got a ISBN along with the name.

~~~
ernesth
Kindle ebooks have no ISBN. They only have Amazon's own Product identifier:
ASIN which needs not be associated to an ISBN.

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salem
Sounds like they still have some things to learn from Zappos

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adestefan
You list with them, you play by their rules. They're not locking you into
their store in anyway shape or form.

~~~
elehack
Except he was playing by the rules, and got shafted anyway. They erroneously
price-matched, making his book free, and depriving him of royalties. Their
mistake; his loss.

~~~
adestefan
I'm sure there's an area of the contract that he agreed to when he listed his
book that Amazon is not liable for pricing mistakes.

So there's the trade-off: you're listed in Amazon's market that is seen by
more people than probably any other e-book market and you're getting royalties
directly, but if Amazon screws up, too bad.

