OverDrive sold to private equity firm KKR

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by stumped

I appreciate that video streaming needs big infrastructure, but simultaneous worldwide launches are surely the best anti-piracy strategy.s

If you have the infrastructure.
Big if.

Netflix does it because they can. It is their competitive advantage for being first.
Others don't because they can't, not because they don't want to. They literally have no way to do it.
What do you want, for a competitor to sit on a Money-makng system in the US, letting Netflix get even bigger, while they wait for the system in lower elbonia to come online?
No business works that way.
Nobody likes international piracy, not the Hollywood crowd and not the Japanese anime producers. But if they can't do global they won't. They'll take the money where they can make it and shrug off lost income where they never could make it.

The BBC is getting ripped by some pundits for not going global and streaming all their content. They actually took time to point out their deals and partnerships with Netflix, Warner, Amazon, PBS, etc limit what they can put out until those contracts expire and by then the "pioneers" will be so far ahead it'll be much tougher to launch anything. Their best strategy for now is to stick with the distribution channels they control and license everywhere else.

CBS ALL ACCESS has a different problem: STAR TREK is their calling card, it has global appeal, but they have no platform outside tbe US. Initially, they licensed STAR TREK DISCOVERY to Netflix outside tbe US but STD turned out to be so...non-TREKish, and expensive, that it soured any future NETFLIX interest. For Picard, they went with PRIME in the UK. They are still years away from being able to afford expansion they have no choice but to license out to whoever they can find.

The CW is a different case. They started streaming their TV shows on Hulu, then switched to their own ad-supported app for next-day streaming and NETFLIX for bingeing a week after the season. Starting with this year's new shows, all their content will go to HBOMAX. And starting next month they'll be doing (experimentally?) a windowed approach with STARGIRL. That one will run weekly on DCU Universe, Warner's comics niche service, ad free. Next day, it will run on ad-supported TV and the third day it will run on the ad-supported CW app. At season's end, it'll go to HBOMAX. They'll make money wherever they can because going by the trailers the show will be the most CGI-intensive show on CW. Also the most comics accurate.

There is big money in streaming, even in the niches.
Anime is big enough to support multiple services, with at least one doing streams an hour after they air in Japan. The anime comanies don't have the resources to do global, so they license. And ignore piracy because it is meaningless to them. In their business model, streaming licenses are a bonus source of revenue, welcome but not essential.

Like with so many things in life, anime producers work with what they have and do what they can. They don't waste time or money fretting over the inpossible.

A lot of book publishers both tradpub and Indie do the same.
You can tell by their DRM-free content.
They let pundits and DRM vendors worry about piracy and focus on making money off things they can control.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by ezdiy

Ironically, amazon is the largest scam site in this regard - as it is a host to thousands of "authors" selling either public domain works, or straight plagiarized copyrighted work under different name.
.

Charging for PD stuff isn't piracy.
Nor is it illegal.
A lot of it is even worth the modest charge.

Also, Amazon doesn't catch scammers immediately but they at least try to weed them out. Eventually. Google doesn't.

Try looking for ebooks in the apps section of Play. Much much bigger and more brazen in tbe appbook section. The copyrighted content is usually encrypted and wrapped in a viewer so ft slips by the fingerprint and watermark filters.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

I dug around a bit and found this article. It's not the same article that I posted then, but it give a concrete example.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/bo...lishing-ebooks

That link doesn't work because the URL was double pasted.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

There are two very different things going on with "pirate" ebooks. First, we have what I call pirate ebooks, i.e. someone selling eBooks that they are not authorized to sell and pocketing.

That doesn't match what I think of as pirate sites at all.

Originally Posted by ezdiy

You confuse pirate sites for scam sites. Internet piracy is overwhelmingly zero cost as it circumvents all licensing.

Yeah, this matches what I think of as piracy sites. That most famous site that is named after a certain kind of bay certainly doesn't require a credit card.

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Then you have fan scans that are frequently available for free download.

Fan scans are much less common than they used to be as so much is now legally available.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by John F

Thank you for link. I wasn't sure how to take your "fairly small" comment.

Distribution cost more than printing, plus that is the cost of a Hardback rather than a paperback. So basically we are talking anywhere from a $1 to $1.50 to print a paperback. Perhaps meaningful, if you are talking about the pulp business model used some indies (churn out a novella for $2 - $3 per month) verses the normal 1 to 2 books per year, which tend to be more in the $5-$7 range.

I suspect that if you were trying to compare print prices for the pulp model, you might want to look at how much a magazine costs to print each month.

Still the idea that eBooks from the regular publishers are grossly overpriced because eBooks are significantly cheaper to produce doesn't really bear up to scrutiny. The fact that indies with the same business model as regular publishers tend to be a dollar or two less expense tends to support that.

[JSWolf]

[QUOTE=pwalker8;3947139Still the idea that eBooks from the regular publishers are grossly overpriced because eBooks are significantly cheaper to produce doesn't really bear up to scrutiny. The fact that indies with the same business model as regular publishers tend to be a dollar or two less expense tends to support that.[/QUOTE]

Besides the extra cost for printing, there's the cost for shipping and the cost for warehousing. Then for the bookstore, there's the cost of the store which I would think is more then the cost of computer servers. nd don't forget the cost of the books not being sold and the cover being returned. So all of these things added in to the cost of printing would make the difference in price more then you think.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Besides the extra cost for printing, there's the cost for shipping and the cost for warehousing. Then for the bookstore, there's the cost of the store which I would think is more then the cost of computer servers. nd don't forget the cost of the books not being sold and the cover being returned. So all of these things added in to the cost of printing would make the difference in price more then you think.

And how much do you think the Amazon infrastructure costs?

[John F]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Distribution cost more than printing, plus that is the cost of a Hardback rather than a paperback. So basically we are talking anywhere from a $1 to $1.50 to print a paperback. Perhaps meaningful, if you are talking about the pulp business model used some indies (churn out a novella for $2 - $3 per month) verses the normal 1 to 2 books per year, which tend to be more in the $5-$7 range.

I suspect that if you were trying to compare print prices for the pulp model, you might want to look at how much a magazine costs to print each month.

Still the idea that eBooks from the regular publishers are grossly overpriced because eBooks are significantly cheaper to produce doesn't really bear up to scrutiny. The fact that indies with the same business model as regular publishers tend to be a dollar or two less expense tends to support that.

I'll let the numbers speak for themselves, and let others provide commentary.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

And how much do you think the Amazon infrastructure costs?

That is irrelevant. eBooks go on a server. That's the cost. pBooks go in a warehouse or a physical store.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

That is irrelevant. eBooks go on a server. That's the cost. pBooks go in a warehouse or a physical store.

that can be very small server: just one 4k movie needs as much server space as about 4k e-books and much more bandwidth to deliver.

and while streaming a movie a day would not be uncommon, the average download rate for books is probably 1 per week, or longer

pbooks have shipping and packaging costs as well as warehouse

the cost per book of running a well designed online library ( excluding royalties ) should be only a few cents per loan. I estimate that I use more bandwidth per month within my netflix subscription than I would use if I borrowed 10 books a day for the rest of my life

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

And how much do you think the Amazon infrastructure costs?

As others have said, compared to the infrastructure required for Prime Video, essentially nothing.
And compared to the cost of renting and operating a chain of bookstores, and physically skipping books around the world, essentially nothing.
(Apart from the fact that Amazon make money from their infrastructure, through AWS.)

[Uncle Robin]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

(Apart from the fact that Amazon make money from their infrastructure, through AWS.)

An important fact that I'm surprised isn't acknowledged more often in discussion here. AWS is easily Amazon's biggest cash cow, everything else is a sideline, whose profitability or lack thereof is largely irrelevant, thanks to how much AWS brings in.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by Uncle Robin

An important fact that I'm surprised isn't acknowledged more often in discussion here. AWS is easily Amazon's biggest cash cow, everything else is a sideline, whose profitability or lack thereof is largely irrelevant, thanks to how much AWS brings in.

It's pretty obvious that most of you guys aren't in IT. Servers and data centers cost money. Lots of money. The company I use to work for was spend in excess of $1 M a month on AWS costs, and that was without using it for production.

AWS comes from the infrastructure that Amazon uses. Amazon does not run it's operation on the same machines that it sells to other companies as part of AWS. Yes, I have done work in the AWS infrastructural.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

It's pretty obvious that most of you guys aren't in IT. Servers and data centers cost money. Lots of money.

I do work in IT, and also in distribution.
Physically moving things around the country (world) costs money, lots of money.
And the costs scale with the number of items sold.
Once Amazon have the infrastructure in place to sell books, the additional unit cost of selling another one is tiny.
Each extra pBook sold is another one printed, shipped to a distributor, warehoused, shipped to a retail outlet, stocked, and possibly ultimately destroyed if it doesn't sell quickly enough.
Digital scales much better than physical does.

[Quoth]

The profits of Amazon eCommerce put into building AWS, so Amazon (unlike Starbucks or Apple) validly paid no or little tax back then.
AWS is now so big and so profitable that the entirety of the rest of the ecommerce of Amazon (and ebooks alone is 90% of world, paper online sales over 80% USA online) is like a stall on their front lawn now.
AWS 2018 sales $25.65 billion

I've worked at a senior level in a ISP selling data centre capacity. I know what the profit margin is. It's better than most retailing. An actual data centre suite is boring and noisy, a NOC (ISP or Data centre, Network Operations Centre) at least has screens and people.