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(not sarcasm, geniunely interested) What prevents anyone from building a company that gives authors 50% or even 75% cut? From the technical standpoint, an app
by SergeAx 4y ago
(not sarcasm, geniunely interested)
What prevents anyone from building a company that gives authors 50% or even 75% cut? From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. One may host and serve audio files via any Bandwidth Alliance[1] CDN and keep the bill quite low, it is just audio, in the end. I'd say, a viable prototype is just a couple of months of work for a team of two-three people with day jobs.
[1]https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/ https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
- SpeedilyDamage 4y agoWhat prevents most of these kinds of ideas from happening is something super mundane; a person to see it through. That’s it. You could definitely create this service, but you’d have to be very good at building a company in a market with big incumbents. Maybe “pay creators more” is enough, or maybe consumers don’t really care where their money goes. You’d have to figure that out! But are you willing to dedicate the next 3-5+ years of your life to this problem? Is anyone?
- Shorel 4y ago> From the technical standpoint, an app to download/listen for audio is not a big feat. With adequate DRM? It definitely is a big feat. Just distributing the files, without any type of encryption, is far from trivial. The fact you link to Cloudflare demonstrates you know you can't host the servers yourself =) Almost anything for ten users is trivial, doing it at scale is hard work.
- SergeAx 4y agoI link to Bandwidth Alliance to emphasize that there is a way to lower a CDN bill. On my previous job we served video via AWS CloudFront and even negotiated a special price for that and S3. Any CDN with their own object storage will hanlde heavy lifting of audio, it is not a big deal and not that expensive to the point of making a garden variety CDN on Digital Ocean or other cloud provider nonsensical. I have to research about DRM, but isn't it goes out of the box on Android and iOS?
- quesera 4y agoI would assert that network transfer costs for audiobook sales are a vanishingly insignificant part of the total cost of running an audiobook publishing business. Rounds to zero, I suspect. This is based on a good knowledge of the size of audiobooks, good knowledge of the price of network transfer, and a reasonable guess on the number of books sold.
- lolinder 4y agoI wonder about DRM. With Audible taking such a big cut, it would be interesting to see a platform that gives creators an 80-90% cut of DRM-free sales. Does piracy represent such a large threat to sales that making >2x more per sale wouldn't be worth it? Sanderson is distributing raw audio to all backers, so he clearly doesn't think so.
- plorg 4y agoThere are a lot of providers who sell DRM-free audiobooks. Until Spotify bought them Findaway was the biggest "distributor" for a lot of these companies. I don't personally look forward to yet another industry locking away content behind a proprietary, subscription streaming service.
- SergeAx 4y agoMost of Amazon ebooks are easily available via Z-Library, so I thing that DRM is not very helpful in fending off piracy.
- zargon 4y agoBTW, all of Sanderson's ebooks published by Tor or self-published (Dragonsteel) are DRM-free.
- taeric 4y agoLicensing the rights to sell the books people want to listen to probably has way more strings attached. Especially for startups that don't have any leverage.
- slowmovintarget 4y agoIt's the subscription model. Amazon has used it to build the largest captive audience, and exploits authors as just a content pump. Authors have to sell where the listeners are. They're on Audible, and that's the problem.