Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-amazon-wont-pay-self-published-author-for-books-it-mistakenly-gave-away/

by rpledge • 15 years ago

162 95 15 years ago

wccrawford• 15 years ago

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.

p0ckets• 15 years ago

I'm sure their agreement had more than one clause. It could very well contain a set of clauses that limits amazon's liability to whatever it collects from customers (in this case, $0).

adamc• 15 years ago

Let's not confuse what's right with the law. The two are only occasionally related.

tomjen3• 15 years ago

Maybe, but lets be honest the price they would have to pay for this is what a few seconds profit? Compared to the risk of losing the next great author because they get scared away that is a very small price to pay.

Not to mention that he may have a case for piracy for commercial gain, in which case Amazon is liable for $300000 a copy (which, at 6000, is more money than most authors will ever see).

toyg5• 15 years ago

"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.

derefr• 15 years ago

If this is true, then content piracy should also be legal. (Amazon effectively did the same thing as a pirate posting the file to a torrent tracker: they satisfied some of their potential customers with a free copy, invalidating them as real customers.)

Conversely, if piracy should be illegal, then this is false, and Amazon is in trouble.

danssig5• 15 years ago

>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.

cbs• 15 years ago

Your point only hold up if the _only_ reason for compensation in the case of physical books would be the cost to the publisher to print them.

I'm trying to understand your point as far as intellectual property. Is it your belief that IP should not be compensated for and the only cost of the work should be whatever is necessary to the goods into consumers hands, be it physical or digital distribution?

I'm not trying to debate that particular position on intellectual property with this post, I'm just trying to establish if that is in fact the position you're taking.

pbhjpbhj3• 15 years ago

>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). //

Legally you're wrong.

This is the reason why you can't call giving away someone else's copyright work on purpose "non-commercial". If you enter the market with the same product for free you interfere with the commercial operation of the rightful owner who is selling for a higher price. You can't generally sell a book to a person who has already been given that book for free. Moreover the effort in promoting the book has been lost without reward.

Now granted it might work out that giving away the product for free acts to increase overall sales. But it's not Amazon's place to make that call (the Bit-torrent/bootlegger defence I suppose you'd call this). Amazon infringed on the copyright of the author.

IMO the legal system should come down hard on a company that is trying to leverage copyright for their own gains whilst simultaneously denying the creator of copyright works the reward of their labours.

Consider a converse situation, that I take a product from a distributor (Disney say), duplicate it and give it away for free. How many millions of pounds do you think I'd be on the hook for?

Incidentally I'm not saying that is right, I'm saying that's how copyright law plays out.

jerf• 15 years ago

Never use metaphors for online issues. They simply don't apply, the online world has far too many differences from the physical world for them to ever work. It isn't like "leaving books around a library", it is like "digital online content was accidentally priced for free when it shouldn't have been and some people downloaded them". This isn't such a complicated situation that we need metaphors to navigate the morass, not that they ever help anyhow since it inevitably causes people to get distracted by arguing over which inapplicable metaphor is more accurate instead of simply addressing the question at hand.

What really matter here is the breach of contract. The contract specified when Amazon can drop the price, that condition was not met, they dropped the price. Apologies or blaming computers are not what is called for here.

ck22• 15 years ago

Actually, if you go by RIAA settlements and court verdicts, non-physical items are actually worth exponentially more than physical.

kevinpet• 15 years ago

A set with two data points cannot imply exponential growth. The phrase you are looking for is "orders of magnitude more".

Please, let's keep exponential around as a word with meaning. It conveys something useful.

awj• 15 years ago

Part of the reasoning there is in calculating the impact of redistribution. When someone tosses an mp3 up on a torrent the RIAA doesn't just lose the immediate (potential) sales for those who downloaded it, but also for anyone that that network shares the files with.

Mind you, I don't agree with the specific numbers they're citing, but the general logic works. It's kind of like the Drake equation, everyone can agree on the general format, but you can plug in specific values to make it mean whatever you want.

mindstab2• 15 years ago

Funny too since Amazon has the ability to revoke books and they did so last year over some issue when a big company was involved, and it pissed off a lot of customers. But now, not only will they not pay the little guy, they won't revoke the erroneously given away books.

leerpm• 15 years ago

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

threepointone• 15 years ago

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

2112313213• 15 years ago

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

dotBen• 15 years ago

This is one of those examples where yes, that sounds like a good idea but the size of the addressable market is rather slim.

Most self-publishers are not making huge amounts of money to justify spending more than a token amount on such monitoring.

A bigger app/suite of services to support self-publishers (especially as many are not tech-savvy) might be helpful, which could include this.

marisela_arias2• 15 years ago

That's not the problem here. The author presumably found the price change rather quickly. It was Amazon that took a long time to respond to the error that's at issue.

adestefan2• 15 years ago

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

uptown• 15 years ago

Except apparently they didn't abide by their own rules ... hence the problem.

elehack• 15 years ago

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.

adestefan2• 15 years ago

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.

ck22• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

'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• 15 years ago

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.

rapind• 15 years ago

Taking it out of the programmer's or manager's pay is ridiculous and probably illegal. You've never written code with a bug or two in it? If you want someone to right bug-free code or take financial responsibility for the code they've written, be ready to pay a lot more than you already do for that extra insurance.

It's a cost of doing business. I do think Amazon should reimburse the guy if only to save on negative publicity over a very small amount.

nicwest• 15 years ago

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.

I don't feel this is quite true. in the ebook-fleamarket example Amazon are also the person that handles any transactions under the tent, helps the customer find what they are looking for, designed the structure of the flea market, and is not insignificantly responsible for way in which a fair few people take their products home.

MattBearman• 15 years ago

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.

archangel_one• 15 years ago

I agree, although it would be even better if Amazon just paid the poor guy without someone having to make them do it. This clearly wasn't intended and it's not like paying even the full sum would make a lot of difference to their bottom line.

roc• 15 years ago

> "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.

delinka• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

It's got a ISBN along with the name.

ernesth• 15 years ago

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

mseebach• 15 years ago

If he gave the excerpt the same ISBN, then it's really his own fault:

An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation (except reprintings) of a book.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Book_Num...

Sure, Amazons customer service could be better and should probably at least have sent an email stating that they're lowering the price etc.

mquinlan• 15 years ago

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.

marisela_arias2• 15 years ago

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.

jxcole• 15 years ago

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.

dminor2• 15 years ago

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

jobu• 15 years ago

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.

3am• 15 years ago

That's incredible, is that really what the revenue split with Amazon looks like?

I'm familiar with Lulu.com, and their standard ebook split gives 80% after the first $0.99 to the author. They even have a special going on right now giving 90%. (http://www.lulu.com/publish/ebooks/?cid=nav_ebks)

Granted you could argue that getting distribution on Amazon and all the Kindle owners is worth the difference. That's what makes it difficult to build a competitor. You could easily make an auction site, but the network effect of eBay is what sets it apart, not the features or pricing.

hxa72412• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

hxa72412• 15 years ago

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

peteysd• 15 years ago

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.

mark_l_watson• 15 years ago

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.

alttag3• 15 years ago

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.

Tichy• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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.

Pahalial• 15 years ago

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?

2112313213• 15 years ago

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

rick888• 15 years ago

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.

mindstab2• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

I thought HN was good at math:

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

2112313213• 15 years ago

make it 0USD payed to others, you still have to give salary to the legal department.

slowpoke6• 15 years ago

You just described the problem of copyright as a whole: it was never designed for the little guy - as the popular myth goes (guess who is spreading that). It was invented by and for publishers (aka the big business), not for authors. That was true in the 16th century when the first ancestor of modern copyright was instated in England, if didn't change with the Statue of Annette, and isn't any different today, either.

salem• 15 years ago

Sounds like they still have some things to learn from Zappos

Amazon Won’t Pay Self-Published Author For Books It Mistakenly Gave Away

Related Stories