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First Disney, Now Audible Stealing From Authors?


Peadar

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According to this link, Audible may have found a neat way to avoid paying creators for their work. If true, it's pretty horrific. Apparently, when people finish listening to a title, even if they loved it, they are permitted to exchange for another and the content creators don't get paid. "You can return it for any reason, no questions asked." Amazon, of course, is still getting the subscription money.

I mean, I could understand it if you listened to the first third of a book and realised you hated it, but to go all the way to the end and then exchange it? Bah.

Also, humbug.

To make it all worse, they've been using strange account reporting methods to make it more difficult for the authors in question to realise what has happened to them.

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Yeah, I use amazon for all sorts of things myself, but I'm feeling very stupid right now. Lots of people warned what would happen if they and other companies were allowed to become giants and here we are.

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On 11/21/2020 at 10:23 PM, Peadar said:

According to this link, Audible may have found a neat way to avoid paying creators for their work. If true, it's pretty horrific. Apparently, when people finish listening to a title, even if they loved it, they are permitted to exchange for another and the content creators don't get paid. "You can return it for any reason, no questions asked." Amazon, of course, is still getting the subscription money.

I mean, I could understand it if you listened to the first third of a book and realised you hated it, but to go all the way to the end and then exchange it? Bah.

Also, humbug.

To make it all worse, they've been using strange account reporting methods to make it more difficult for the authors in question to realise what has happened to them.

When a normal person does it it's piracy, when Amazon does it it's business as usual.

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3 hours ago, dog-days said:

Audible has changed its policy a little, but not enough, IMO. Seven days is way too long to allow someone a book without royalties going to the author. 

Agreed! Personally, I'd be happy enough with a percentage of the book -- say, 30%. It gives somebody a fair shot of saying whether they like the book or not.

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Hell no.  I've got plenty of books on my kindle that I've yet to read for multiple reasons.  If was with Prime and had downloaded them without reading them, I'd be pissed that the author didn't get any money.

But then, I suppose that is why I buy all my content, even if I don't read half of it. 

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I can weather this audiobook storm and so can a lot of other Audible dependent authors like those who work for Crossroad Press but I know some narrators, particularly those who depend on payments from royalty share, that this has effectively wiped out the income for. The number of returned audiobooks is not at all a small amount.

One of my friends actually has not made ANY money in 3 months because of this.

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