<story><title>Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%</title><url>http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>It&apos;s ridiculous to include the cost of the entire &quot;Kindle ecosystem&quot; with a fee called &quot;delivery fee&quot; - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it&apos;s just 3G service that they leased from AT&amp;#38;T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachment over 3g on my phone, essentially the same thing, I would be absolutely livid if I was charged $2.58.&lt;p&gt;Amazon&apos;s &quot;delivery fee&quot; is 15 cents/megabyte. By comparison, AT&amp;#38;T&apos;s &lt;i&gt;most expensive pay-as-you-go&lt;/i&gt; data plan is $15 for 250MB, or 6 c/MB, less than half the price. Their cheapest plan is 1 cent/MB.&lt;p&gt;Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it&apos;s very clear to me that they&apos;re just taking a huge margin here.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>Hosting a static file in S3 you have to point people to manually find and download themselves is much cheaper because you don&apos;t have the built in captive audience, WhisperNet and everything else which comes with the Kindle ecosystem, so comparing the two only via a flat dollar cost is naive.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>Did you read the blog post? The author specifically was comparing the cost of delivery via the Kindle service to using Amazon S3/EC2 to deliver the content. His specific comparison was that the price that he would pay to host and deliver the content using Amazon&apos;s own services, would be orders of magnitude smaller! In other words, the comparison you are making is the exact basis for his entirely justified claim that Amazon&apos;s delivery fee is complete ripoff.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>&amp;#62;  charging several dollars for a &quot;delivery fee&quot; of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because &quot;it says so in the contract&quot; is ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;You aren&apos;t actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon&apos;s Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post doesn&apos;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 &quot;delivery fee&quot; of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!&lt;p&gt;There is a huge disconnect between the attitude of &quot;any price that people will pay is a fair price&quot; 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 &quot;delivery charge&quot; that is absurd.&lt;p&gt;This kind of thing is a very old game in business, but that doesn&apos;t make it ok. Just because something is common and legal doesn&apos;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.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is confusing. Here is someone with a &lt;i&gt;FANTASTIC&lt;/i&gt; first outing of a book and he&apos;s whinging about it?&lt;p&gt;The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the &apos;gorilla&apos; is taking a bigger percentage of the take?&lt;p&gt;Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).&lt;p&gt;So what is his complaint? That he didn&apos;t read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?&lt;p&gt;Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?&lt;p&gt;And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn&apos;t he &apos;get&apos; that he could not have published this book at this level of success &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt; prior to Amazon?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-about-travel?ref=live&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waterlesscloud</author><text>What they&apos;re doing is charging one fee based on price and an additional fee based on file size.  This separates the incentives for the publisher, which makes sense.&lt;p&gt;It&apos;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%</title><url>http://andrewhy.de/amazons-markup-of-digital-delivery-to-indie-authors-is-129000/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>dandelany</author><text>It&apos;s ridiculous to include the cost of the entire &quot;Kindle ecosystem&quot; with a fee called &quot;delivery fee&quot; - as other posts have mentioned, this is what commission is for. WhisperNet is another story - this is legitimately a part of the delivery - however, it&apos;s just 3G service that they leased from AT&amp;#38;T, and to assume it costs them even close to $2.58 per delivery is just ignorant. If I downloaded an 18MB e-mail attachment over 3g on my phone, essentially the same thing, I would be absolutely livid if I was charged $2.58.&lt;p&gt;Amazon&apos;s &quot;delivery fee&quot; is 15 cents/megabyte. By comparison, AT&amp;#38;T&apos;s &lt;i&gt;most expensive pay-as-you-go&lt;/i&gt; data plan is $15 for 250MB, or 6 c/MB, less than half the price. Their cheapest plan is 1 cent/MB.&lt;p&gt;Amazon is known for having very reasonable data storage/transfer fees in their other services, so it&apos;s very clear to me that they&apos;re just taking a huge margin here.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>Hosting a static file in S3 you have to point people to manually find and download themselves is much cheaper because you don&apos;t have the built in captive audience, WhisperNet and everything else which comes with the Kindle ecosystem, so comparing the two only via a flat dollar cost is naive.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>Did you read the blog post? The author specifically was comparing the cost of delivery via the Kindle service to using Amazon S3/EC2 to deliver the content. His specific comparison was that the price that he would pay to host and deliver the content using Amazon&apos;s own services, would be orders of magnitude smaller! In other words, the comparison you are making is the exact basis for his entirely justified claim that Amazon&apos;s delivery fee is complete ripoff.</text></item><item><author>res0nat0r</author><text>&amp;#62;  charging several dollars for a &quot;delivery fee&quot; of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>mycroftiv</author><text>He is making an entirely justified complaint that Amazon charges unreasonable fees. The idea that any and all corporate behavior is fine simply because &quot;it says so in the contract&quot; is ridiculous.&lt;p&gt;You aren&apos;t actually paying attention to what the author wrote - he even specifically talked about how Amazon&apos;s Kindle platform provides a good experience for readers and has accounted for the majority of his sales. His post doesn&apos;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 &quot;delivery fee&quot; of a digital book is OBVIOUS BS!&lt;p&gt;There is a huge disconnect between the attitude of &quot;any price that people will pay is a fair price&quot; 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 &quot;delivery charge&quot; that is absurd.&lt;p&gt;This kind of thing is a very old game in business, but that doesn&apos;t make it ok. Just because something is common and legal doesn&apos;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.</text></item><item><author>ChuckMcM</author><text>This is confusing. Here is someone with a &lt;i&gt;FANTASTIC&lt;/i&gt; first outing of a book and he&apos;s whinging about it?&lt;p&gt;The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the &apos;gorilla&apos; is taking a bigger percentage of the take?&lt;p&gt;Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).&lt;p&gt;So what is his complaint? That he didn&apos;t read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?&lt;p&gt;Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?&lt;p&gt;And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn&apos;t he &apos;get&apos; that he could not have published this book at this level of success &lt;i&gt;at all&lt;/i&gt; prior to Amazon?&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-about-travel?ref=live&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>reedlaw</author><text>Probably Amazon is charging more to offset the cost of their unlimited free 3G usage. Before I had a 3G phone, I purchased a 3G Kindle partially to take advantage of this incredible offer. With a 3G Kindle in the US I could freely browse the web anywhere with no limit.</text></comment>