Authors are protesting Amazon's 'read and return' e-book policy

[MGlitch]

I picked shoes simply as an example of something you can't do in a store, they're obviously quite different to books.

FWIW I don't think your use case is a problem either Hitch, freebies are freebies, and if a book is so riddled with issues you can't make it even say 20% of the way through without them driving you up the wall, then those are bad books.

Also, I'm not sure where the idea that bookstores don't sell returned physical books at full retail value came from. It's certainly not the case in the US, unless a book has been damaged to a pretty decent degree it just gets put back on the shelf. I don't know how Amazon handles their returned books, but I'd imagine it's similar.

[Sirtel]

Personally I've returned perhaps 3-4 ebooks in 12 years, and never because I didn't like them. One I returned because it was a bad conversion from PDF, not a real reflowing ebook (it was self-published, of course). One was a wrong book (a mess-up on Amazon's part) and one I already had (the title and the pen name of the author were different, the cover as well, that's why even Calibre didn't help).

I don't like a lot of books; I never return them for this reason. It's a risk I'm willing to take. And it's different from returning, say, non-fitting shoes, because non-fitting shoes are unusable. A poorly written ebook (unless it's a total sham or so badly formatted it's basically unreadable) is not.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

I have never heard/seen a book interpret the text it contains

And you've seen music which interprets itself without being listened to by anyone?

What of audiobooks? Do they, in your world, gain the ability to interpret themselves because they have changed mediums from a written to an oral?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

I have never heard/seen a book interpret the text it contains

I'm curious--not necessarily arguing--are you distinguishing, say, a play or a movie, because it's "interpreted" by the director and the actors, as being significantly different than reading the same thing in play format?

So that if I see Shakespeare in the Park, the nature of the content is different than if I simply sit down and read the Bard?

HItch

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Hitch

So that if I see Shakespeare in the Park, the nature of the content is different than if I simply sit down and read the Bard?

Of course.
Reading a score is vastly different from sitting at the opera.

[MGlitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

Of course.
Reading a score is vastly different from sitting at the opera.

Which would be sensible if we were discussing buying sheet music vs a book, but we’re talking listening to a purchased song or album, watching a show or movie vs reading a book.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

Of course.
Reading a score is vastly different from sitting at the opera.

I'm not sure I concur. You seem to discount entirely the reader's imagination. For that matter, if I read a piece of music, I might "hear" someone with incredible pipes in my head--Freddie Mercury, Christina Aquilera, Cher, Barbra Streisand, Whitney...whereas the person who might perform it for me, live, might not be nearly that good. (I mean, that's always the case with Queen, today, for example. That kid has a good voice, but Freddie, he ain't.)

In terms of books, we all have the same thing going--we've all read books where we've been woefully disappointed in the movie version. The movie version can't come close to what we imagined, in our minds. (I mean, there's a reason, all these years down the road, why the Dragonriders of Pern remain a moviemakers' fantasy...).

I'm not sure you can say that somehow, renting a movie of X and digesting a book of it are so inexorably different that they should be treated like chalk and cheese in this specific discussion.

Hitch

[ottischwenk]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I'm not sure I concur. You seem to discount entirely the reader's imagination.

That in turn only has to do with you, at best periferously with the work - someone else will certainly see/feel differently at the same point

[Ned]

A fascinating thread, not sure what it started off about, but I agree entirely with the importance of the readers (words and music) and their imagination.
I write (good) poetry and different people see vastly different things in my poems - many of which were unintended directly, but always there to be inferred from the choice of words used.

And spot on with Freddie Mercury being the one and only.
ps I wish Brian May and Roger Taylor would pack it in. They are not Queen and just look silly half the time, old men trying to be cool.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Ned

A fascinating thread, not sure what it started off about, but I agree entirely with the importance of the readers (words and music) and their imagination.
I write (good) poetry and different people see vastly different things in my poems - many of which were unintended directly, but always there to be inferred from the choice of words used.

Wait--gasp!--there's GOOD poetry? (j/k)

And spot on with Freddie Mercury being the one and only.
ps I wish Brian May and Roger Taylor would pack it in. They are not Queen and just look silly half the time, old men trying to be cool.

Freddie's loss...man, It was horrible. I rarely give a toss about performers, singers, dancers, actors (least of all) but I grieve his loss to this day.

Hitch

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by ottischwenk

That in turn only has to do with you, at best periferously with the work - someone else will certainly see/feel differently at the same point

Your comments would seem to indicate that you feel that everyone who reads a book would have the exactly the same reaction to it. My experience has been that much as visual, audio-visual or audio media, people's reactions vary when reading a book.

[Apache]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Your comments would seem to indicate that you feel that everyone who reads a book would have the exactly the same reaction to it. My experience has been that much as visual, audio-visual or audio media, people's reactions vary when reading a book.

If they didn't, we would all be reading the exact same books.
Apache

[Paperbackstash]

I've accidentally purchased some e-books before, but cancelled immediately. Otherwise books intentionally purchase I've never even thought about returning, even if I didn't enjoy them. I'm not surprised people take advantage of this, though. I am surprised Amazon doesn't have a cut off limit like they've had to do with Audible.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by MGlitch

The fact that anyone seem to think that a high level of production cost results in a high quality product is laughable and moderately concerning when every market is filled with examples to the contrary. So please spare me the “I’m taking a chance on an indie author” nonsense. You take a chance on all art.

Sure--but no matter what you say, the bottom line is, when you take a chance on "art" of any kind, whether it's paintings, sculpture, music or books, you are taking less of a chance in an arena in which there are gatekeepers. That's simply the bottom line. Were that NOT the case, trade publishing would never have vastly and rapidly outpaced self-publishing in the first place. (yes, there are arguments about a publishing company being better able to eat the costs of publishing--editing, etc.--but c'mon, "trade publishers" all started out as one-man bands in the first damn place, no better able to fork out thousands on an edit than the original author, so that argument doesn't really hold water.)

Sure, you can cruise a beachfront, boardwalk, downtown area and stop and look at every streetside artist. Hell, you could even organize a "showing" one night, with every painter, artist in other media, etc. all showing up in the area and displaying their wares. You can also invest that same time in going to a gallery opening, a museum, or like Scottsdale, AZ, an "Art Walk" in which all the local galleries have a night in which they display their various artists. Hmmm...I wonder which event(s) people will make more time for? Lemme think....in the case of the latter examples, all have been subjected to gatekeepers. In the former, there are zero gatekeepers and while I don't have a polling to fall back on, I think you'd find that those folks interested in art will do the latter in significantly greater numbers than the former. (Assuming that they're not coming off a lockdown, bored spitless and all that.)

And the idea that an author would rather return money for an unspecified reason vs a review which actually gives them feedback is bonkers.

Really? Presumably, then, you either skimmed, missed, or what, completely blew off the part of my post about that, where I said I'd polled my customers? I've produced books for +/-5,000 of them--self-publishing authors. Now, color me biased, but I think that's a fairly representative sampling of self-pubs. Overwhelmingly--overwhelmingly, by a factor of 4:1, they would rather refund money than get a bad review. For that matter, a distinction--for a new book, a new release, that increases to an 11:1 ratio. The 4:1, by the way, is for a book that already has 100+ reviews. That's how much weight they give negative reviews--how much business they think that they can lose, due to a well-written negative review. (As opposed to "I hated it" or the like.)

So, you can think I'm "bonkers" all you want, but my customer base disagrees with you--and they're pretty much all self-published authors (with a small cadre of newer publishing houses).

Hitch

[Apache]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Sure--but no matter what you say, the bottom line is, when you take a chance on "art" of any kind, whether it's paintings, sculpture, music or books, you are taking less of a chance in an arena in which there are gatekeepers. That's simply the bottom line. Were that NOT the case, trade publishing would never have vastly and rapidly outpaced self-publishing in the first place. (yes, there are arguments about a publishing company being better able to eat the costs of publishing--editing, etc.--but c'mon, "trade publishers" all started out as one-man bands in the first damn place, no better able to fork out thousands on an edit than the original author, so that argument doesn't really hold water.)

Sure, you can cruise a beachfront, boardwalk, downtown area and stop and look at every streetside artist. Hell, you could even organize a "showing" one night, with every painter, artist in other media, etc. all showing up in the area and displaying their wares. You can also invest that same time in going to a gallery opening, a museum, or like Scottsdale, AZ, an "Art Walk" in which all the local galleries have a night in which they display their various artists. Hmmm...I wonder which event(s) people will make more time for? Lemme think....in the case of the latter examples, all have been subjected to gatekeepers. In the former, there are zero gatekeepers and while I don't have a polling to fall back on, I think you'd find that those folks interested in art will do the latter in significantly greater numbers than the former. (Assuming that they're not coming off a lockdown, bored spitless and all that.)



Really? Presumably, then, you either skimmed, missed, or what, completely blew off the part of my post about that, where I said I'd polled my customers? I've produced books for +/-5,000 of them--self-publishing authors. Now, color me biased, but I think that's a fairly representative sampling of self-pubs. Overwhelmingly--overwhelmingly, by a factor of 4:1, they would rather refund money than get a bad review. For that matter, a distinction--for a new book, a new release, that increases to an 11:1 ratio. The 4:1, by the way, is for a book that already has 100+ reviews. That's how much weight they give negative reviews--how much business they think that they can lose, due to a well-written negative review. (As opposed to "I hated it" or the like.)

So, you can think I'm "bonkers" all you want, but my customer base disagrees with you--and they're pretty much all self-published authors (with a small cadre of newer publishing houses).

Hitch

I have to agree with Hitch.
When you refund the customer the money they paid for your work, you only have made an unhappy customer happy. One bad review will have many more potential customers think that buying your work might be a bad idea. Do the math.
Apache