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How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy
- revelation 15y agoThere are really Markov chain generated books on Amazon? I guess it is becoming a trash dumpster after all.
- tomjen3 15y agoIt certainly would be an interesting idea, and while it wouldn't be difficult to write them, who in their right mind would buy them, much less not demand a refund?
- jacques_chester 15y ago> who in their right mind would buy them The sort of people who, according Phineas Taylor Barnum, are born every minute.
- olefoo 15y agoIt's one chain of a money laundering operation. Multiple books are created at high but not too high prices. Stolen funds are used to buy them; (through multiple intermediaries, work from home mules being a favorite) and the profits are moved through multiple accounts as well. The criminals don't care that they are giving a bunch of money to Amazon (it's stolen remember), they do want the funds coming out to be clean, untraceable, and usable. The unfortunate thing being that Amazon's incentives are, in this case, aligned with those of the criminals. And while I'm sure that Amazon regularly helps law enforcement track down this sort of thing, I wouldn't doubt that there exists a temptation to not notice that sort of misbehaviour.
- ars 15y agoHow would amazon even know? And in any case it's not necessary to use fake book. You can publish a 10 page "book" with your random doodles and use that.
- r00fus 15y agoTaking this line of thought to it's logical conclusion, how many real "books" are actually just a simple way of laundering money? I mean, who actually buys the book by Rick Santorum?
- olefoo 15y agoThat's a good point. Few actual people want to read Newt Gingrich's political autobiography, yet it was a New York Times bestseller based on sales. And Romney has done similar things http://www.salon.com/2010/10/15/mitt_romney_book/ http://www.salon.com/2010/10/15/mitt_romney_book/
- Erwin 15y agoSounds like this could be the plot of the next Stross book. In 2020, the ordinary tax base has almost been destroyed. Everyone channels their illegal earnings by generating and reselling Kindle books. The main character of the book is a government bot program designed to analyze books and dig through BitCoin chains to determine whether the transactions are fraudulent or genuine. But as all goods have turned to electronic form, are they even any humans at the end of these transactions? Everything changes when the computer program has to analyze (some religious/philosophical book). I wonder if anyone has written a book from the point of view of a computer program (and not just yet another human-like AI in a strange glowing suit). Stanislaw Lem's books may be close.
- geoffschmidt 15y agoOr the Philip K Dick version. Everything changes when the program has to analyze... itself.
- brianobush 15y agoI believe it is entitled "Vulcan's Hammer"
- dsr_ 15y agoParts of _The Adolescence of P1_ by Thomas Ryan are from the viewpoint of P1, which is an AI that develops from a learning worm written for IBM mainframes by a protohacker at U Waterloo.
- AJ007 15y agoI'd pay to see a demographic profile of the buyers.
- klenwell 15y agoThis was covered a few years ago in a New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/business/media/14link.html... "Philip M. Parker seems to have licked that problem. Mr. Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it."
- pavel_lishin 15y agoI'm not sure how Amazon works; if they discount your book, and I buy it at the sale price, did you just get shafted out of some money? Or do they make up the difference?
- gravitronic 15y agoNote my %'s may be off slightly but it's irrelevant to the question. If their book sales are similar to their Android App Store then as the publisher you get whichever is more between. "20 percent of list price and 70 percent of sale price" So Amazon can sell it for whatever it wants but will owe you 20% of what you listed the book at. It gives them a very wide margin to play with.
- femto 15y agoAdvantage Instructions and Rules - Updated January 29, 2008 [1] 7.2 "You, the vendor, receive 45% of the List Price. You set the List Price, also known as Suggested Retail Price, of your products, and all payments made to you are calculated based on the List Price. If Amazon.com decides to further reduce the sales price to the customer below the List Price, the customer discount comes out of Amazon.com's percentage." [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-product-page.html?topic=200339300 https://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-product-page.htm...
- nirvana 15y agoWait, Amazon takes %55 of the list price, and has control over the actual price its sold at. Meanwhile, Apple takes %30, and you have total control over pricing. Yet whenever the iBookstore comes up here, people go on and on about the "Apple tax" and how Apple is trying to drive authors out of business? By taking Less?
- mikeash 15y agoIsn't this comparing physical sales on Amazon's side with electronic sales on Apple's side?
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- jsackmann 15y agoIn my experience: Amazon automatically discounts some books, a certain time after their release. I've published several through their subsidiary CreateSpace, and the two that sold more than negligible amounts were discount the same ~28%. One eventually went back to my 'retail' and the other stayed discounted. Again in my experience, Amazon's discounts do not effect the author's take. At least in CreateSpace, the author's royalty is based on the retail price the author sets.
- gcb 15y agoIf it has free shiping, why not buy 1.000 books for $10 and move them back to your inventory?
- apieceofpi 15y ago"trust the tattooed hipster who wrote Amazon's pricing algorithm" Am I missing some context here? Amazon is full of tattooed hipsters?
- egypturnash 15y agoLooking at the nerds I've met around Seattle, this is a fairly safe bet.
- jeffbarr 15y ago> Look around. I see no tattooed hipsters here.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- jarek 15y agoSimilar story from last year: "Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies" http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=358 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2475854
- hakanensari 15y agoFun, intelligent articles, but both glorify essentially dumb "algorithms" by garage entrepreneurs that end up generating offers that will never sell.
- wtvanhest 15y agoIs it possible to do the following: Invent a fake book Post it for a high price Watch Bots price it up Buy one from a bot Sell the only real one far above the bot price Profit? (because the bot owner must then buy the book to ship it to the person who already bought it?)
- jerf 15y agoIf you can make that actually happen, the bot will end up canceling your order and take the reputation hit. It's all a numbers game to them.
- wtvanhest 15y agoI remember reading an article before which stated that the bots are able to charge a higher price because they have a good reputation. I guess it depends on how much you want to make. Maybe the bot would pay $1 extra, but not $20 extra?
- spullara 15y agoThe reason this doesn't work is that it isn't like eBay. You are not required, as a seller, to complete a transaction.
- pbhjpbhj 15y agoYou pay $100 for the book and get $15 back, say, as your 30% cut. Then they buy the book from you for $90 ... /jk
- damian2000 15y agoThis live amazon page here shows that the price for a book has been increased artificially to $7.5 million due to bots ... http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0956205100?ie=UTF8&linkCode=shr&camp=213733&creative=393193&ref_=dp_olp_used&sr=1-10&condition=used http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0956205100?ie=UTF8... (I got this via a tweet a few hours ago, and it seems like its still broken...)
- rplnt 15y agoMaybe it's just author trying to recover from personal bankruptcy.
- Tichy 15y agoDoesn't Amazon ban you for selling non-existent books? Because otherwise it has occurred to me that next time I look into buying a book, I could pretend to sell it for a really low price and wait for a bot to underbid me, so that I can buy it off the bot for very little money.