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"Yeah sure, and the major publishing houses are all little angels, who would never dream of using the huge amounts of money they have on dirty tricks that are less obvious. "
Chris Meadows on "A War Against the Indie Author? - Posted on June 20, 2013
"Well, i am spent after this debate. I wrote my final piece on the issue today and actually learned a fair bit. Many self-publishers paying for reviews and artificially inflate their position in eBook ranking on Amazon, kobo, barnes and noble and others by paying people to download their book, paying people to write reviews and paying people to leave 5 star ratings. I was aware of John Locke, he did this and sold over ..."
michael kozlowski on "A War Against the Indie Author? - Posted on June 20, 2013
"@Chris; What I remember from the reports at the time (leaked by the studios) was that during negotiations Apple did not object to higher pricing on new releases (more money for them) but they refused to budge on the $0.99 floor. So the bone of contention was the lower bound of variable pricing (and the lower "commission" Apple would earn per track). Apple has never been a big fann of "making it up with volume". "
Felix Torres on "Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It - Posted on June 19, 2013
"An similar effect could be achieved by adding non-printing ASCII characters to the text. Readers would never see it. Of course, programmers could remove those too, but they could also write a program to do the change words around. If hackers had access to two or more texts, they could compare the differences to produce a "clean" third copy. "
Greg M. on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"So this is a fallback scheme in the case where the regular DRM is defeated and identifying info in the eBook (name and CC #) is stripped out? Supplementary DRM, in other words. "
Frank Lowney on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Sellers like complexity because that enables them to clip consumers a little here and a little there. It also confounds price comparison thereby amplifying the effect of advertising which, incidentally, is a cost passed on to the customer. Making it simple is pro consumer. Making it complex is anti-consumer. Digital goods are different from physical goods because they are produced on demand rather than in batches that sit in warehouses and ..."
Frank Lowney on "Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Wow, thread necromancy. The problem with allowing returns at all is that you hit the scenario where someone downloads it, cracks it, then "returns" it. With Apprentice Alf, this process is now essentially as easy as drag and drop. This is also why CDs, DVDs, and software are not returnable once they've been opened: if you've opened it, you could have ripped/cracked it. The problem with not allowing returns is that sooner or later someone's going ..."
Chris Meadows on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"All this talk about people who *won't* take advantage of all the offerings out there, such as the much-mentioned $30 professional book cover. What about the people who *can't* take advantage of them? What about the people who have to choose between a $30 professional book cover and this month's electric bill? Or feeding their families for the next few days? Don't those people deserve to have their work read, too? I realize that this is ..."
Fiona Skye on "Diminishing returns dawn for self-publishing? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"The "myth of the golden past" has been with us for a long, long time, is with us today and will likely be with us for the foreseeable future. We tend to repress bad memories, an effective defense mechanism, so the more time that goes by the more positive our recollections get. "
Frank Lowney on "xkcd Trawls Public Domain to Show That the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Felix, now you're only telling part of the story there. They wanted to sell some old music cheaper—but they also wanted to sell the newest hits at $1.29. Some rivals, like eMusic, and music industry analysts have suggested the higher prices come at a particularly bad time for the newly frugal American consumer, who had grown quite accustomed to 99-cent purchases. Amazon might now increase its share, since it now sells many of the same hits ..."
Chris Meadows on "Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Great points Steve. I didn't even think about how it would hit non-fiction work and you touched on some really important points. "
Susan Lulgjuraj on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Fiction authors may be offended by this, but I think the implications for non-fiction work are staggering. Consider the potential harm, not only to someone who has a pirated copy of a book, but to someone who encounters quoted material copied, pasted, and posted by someone else with a pirated text: 1) The new DRM turns a quotation from a public figure into a scandalous comment that then goes viral. 2) Someone is injured or suffers property ..."
Steve on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"I agree, Mary. On my website I have a personal guarantee on my books, but I do ask for a reason. I have never had a return yet from the website, but I did get a very nice person on Amazon who wrote and said she returned it because of the foul language. That's my fault. I should have found a better way to warn people that the book had violence and language. I ..."
giacomo giammatteo on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Giacomo, I would strongly agree that to return a book, a reason would have to be supplied. Surely the author deserves to know if there is something wrong with the formatting or the book is rife with misspellings. Not liking the book isn't a good enough reason. I have abandoned reading several books which I have paid for but did not return them. It's the chance you take with any book; you aren't going to ..."
Mary on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"just i, I did check. When I wrote the article, the HTML still had precisely the issues I mentioned. Checking just now, in Chrome and Firefox, the HTML for the entire poem is coming up all italic, so I'm not sure what's going on with the rendering. Part III of the poem, The Fire Sermon, still has missing breaks between sections. There and elsewhere there are also editorial footnotes appearing within the main text. "
Paul StJohn Mackintosh on "Waste Land auction shows print value, Gutenberg problems for poetry - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Stephen: I'm an author, and I don't think Amazon is exploiting authors. We have to remember that Amazon's customers are not authors, but readers. They have to satisfy them. If a reader buys a book and isn't satisfied with it, I see no problem in allowing them to return it. Yes, a few will take advantage, but not many. Of the thousands of books I've sold, not more than 25 or 30 have been returned. ..."
giacomo giammatteo on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
More Comments
"Yeah sure, and the major publishing houses are all little angels, who would never dream of using the huge amounts of money they have on dirty tricks that are less obvious. "
Chris Meadows on "A War Against the Indie Author? - Posted on June 20, 2013
"Well, i am spent after this debate. I wrote my final piece on the issue today and actually learned a fair bit. Many self-publishers paying for reviews and artificially inflate their position in eBook ranking on Amazon, kobo, barnes and noble and others by paying people to download their book, paying people to write reviews and paying people to leave 5 star ratings. I was aware of John Locke, he did this and sold over ..."
michael kozlowski on "A War Against the Indie Author? - Posted on June 20, 2013
"@Chris; What I remember from the reports at the time (leaked by the studios) was that during negotiations Apple did not object to higher pricing on new releases (more money for them) but they refused to budge on the $0.99 floor. So the bone of contention was the lower bound of variable pricing (and the lower "commission" Apple would earn per track). Apple has never been a big fann of "making it up with volume". "
Felix Torres on "Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It - Posted on June 19, 2013
"An similar effect could be achieved by adding non-printing ASCII characters to the text. Readers would never see it. Of course, programmers could remove those too, but they could also write a program to do the change words around. If hackers had access to two or more texts, they could compare the differences to produce a "clean" third copy. "
Greg M. on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"So this is a fallback scheme in the case where the regular DRM is defeated and identifying info in the eBook (name and CC #) is stripped out? Supplementary DRM, in other words. "
Frank Lowney on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Sellers like complexity because that enables them to clip consumers a little here and a little there. It also confounds price comparison thereby amplifying the effect of advertising which, incidentally, is a cost passed on to the customer. Making it simple is pro consumer. Making it complex is anti-consumer. Digital goods are different from physical goods because they are produced on demand rather than in batches that sit in warehouses and ..."
Frank Lowney on "Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Wow, thread necromancy. The problem with allowing returns at all is that you hit the scenario where someone downloads it, cracks it, then "returns" it. With Apprentice Alf, this process is now essentially as easy as drag and drop. This is also why CDs, DVDs, and software are not returnable once they've been opened: if you've opened it, you could have ripped/cracked it. The problem with not allowing returns is that sooner or later someone's going ..."
Chris Meadows on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"All this talk about people who *won't* take advantage of all the offerings out there, such as the much-mentioned $30 professional book cover. What about the people who *can't* take advantage of them? What about the people who have to choose between a $30 professional book cover and this month's electric bill? Or feeding their families for the next few days? Don't those people deserve to have their work read, too? I realize that this is ..."
Fiona Skye on "Diminishing returns dawn for self-publishing? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"The "myth of the golden past" has been with us for a long, long time, is with us today and will likely be with us for the foreseeable future. We tend to repress bad memories, an effective defense mechanism, so the more time that goes by the more positive our recollections get. "
Frank Lowney on "xkcd Trawls Public Domain to Show That the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Felix, now you're only telling part of the story there. They wanted to sell some old music cheaper—but they also wanted to sell the newest hits at $1.29. Some rivals, like eMusic, and music industry analysts have suggested the higher prices come at a particularly bad time for the newly frugal American consumer, who had grown quite accustomed to 99-cent purchases. Amazon might now increase its share, since it now sells many of the same hits ..."
Chris Meadows on "Motley Fool Uses Apple Anti-Trust Suit to Scare People into Paying It - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Great points Steve. I didn't even think about how it would hit non-fiction work and you touched on some really important points. "
Susan Lulgjuraj on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Fiction authors may be offended by this, but I think the implications for non-fiction work are staggering. Consider the potential harm, not only to someone who has a pirated copy of a book, but to someone who encounters quoted material copied, pasted, and posted by someone else with a pirated text: 1) The new DRM turns a quotation from a public figure into a scandalous comment that then goes viral. 2) Someone is injured or suffers property ..."
Steve on "New DRM looks to change words in e-books - Posted on June 19, 2013
"I agree, Mary. On my website I have a personal guarantee on my books, but I do ask for a reason. I have never had a return yet from the website, but I did get a very nice person on Amazon who wrote and said she returned it because of the foul language. That's my fault. I should have found a better way to warn people that the book had violence and language. I ..."
giacomo giammatteo on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Giacomo, I would strongly agree that to return a book, a reason would have to be supplied. Surely the author deserves to know if there is something wrong with the formatting or the book is rife with misspellings. Not liking the book isn't a good enough reason. I have abandoned reading several books which I have paid for but did not return them. It's the chance you take with any book; you aren't going to ..."
Mary on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
"just i, I did check. When I wrote the article, the HTML still had precisely the issues I mentioned. Checking just now, in Chrome and Firefox, the HTML for the entire poem is coming up all italic, so I'm not sure what's going on with the rendering. Part III of the poem, The Fire Sermon, still has missing breaks between sections. There and elsewhere there are also editorial footnotes appearing within the main text. "
Paul StJohn Mackintosh on "Waste Land auction shows print value, Gutenberg problems for poetry - Posted on June 19, 2013
"Stephen: I'm an author, and I don't think Amazon is exploiting authors. We have to remember that Amazon's customers are not authors, but readers. They have to satisfy them. If a reader buys a book and isn't satisfied with it, I see no problem in allowing them to return it. Yes, a few will take advantage, but not many. Of the thousands of books I've sold, not more than 25 or 30 have been returned. ..."
giacomo giammatteo on "Amazon's e-book return policy: Fair or unfair? - Posted on June 19, 2013
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