Um. Amazon is a marketplace, it gets a cut. Since the sale is void, the seller gets 0, Amazon gets some percent of that, which is ... 0.

what the hell. how else could it be? if Amazon is billing sellers for "transaction" costs (or presence on platform cost), that's one thing, but that should be a fixed dollar amount.

even using the term "cost" makes no sense, because it's not a cost, it's "would have been revenue", and yes, there's a cost of doing business, handling returns, etc. but all of those are automated on this shiny marketplace, right, right? right!?

Yeah I genuienly think that the author expects Amazon to just eat the cost of returned books. Looking at their other arguments, I guess it's simply because "they can afford it". And while that's true, I don't see any reason why it should work this way - even actual real life bookstores return unsold books to publisher and the publisher has to eat that cost.

And that’s a good thing, because it gives publishers incentive to put out quality products. I’m convinced almost anything originating on Twitter is knee jerk alarmism.

People need to understand that the people making these tweets have incentive to create outrage for more exposure/followers. “Introducing Audiblegate” - Maybe I’m jaded, but you JUST KNOW they were hoping someone like The Verge would eat that up as a headline and link their Tweet in the ensuing article.

Amazon has done some really shady stuff in their lifetime, but cmon.

>because it gives publishers incentive to put out quality products

I wouldn't say quality products, lowest common denominator and all.

It’s possible that author is bad at basic arithmetic and doesn’t understand that 40% of $0 is $0.

It’s interesting to me how many people lack basic financial critical thinking skills and even something super basic like profit isn’t intuitive to all (but it should). So if I see a $5 income one month and a $-1 income next month because the two people returned their book, I get angry instead of trying to understand why.

In the old paper publishing world it took a long time for this accounting so it wasn’t as easy to see the returns. I remember a friend who worked at a bookstore and they would tear the cover off books and send the cover back as a return. The return would be credited against the store account and not count towards author royalties.

Well, taking it to absurd levels it would be something like if Spotify were to claim they are 'selling' songs to people who are currently listening to them and they are 'returned' when people stop, with Spotify just paying royalties over the difference.

The situation with audiobooks is far less extreme, but there is a cost attached to lenient return policies. Though you'd expect Amazon to be losing more money on it than the authors, so it's more like the authors disagree with Amazon's business model.

I'd love to know the stats for how many people listen to the entire book(or 90% of it) and then return it. I have refunded books on audible before, but it was always because I didn't like the narrator, I listen to books while driving and sometimes the narration works in the car, sometimes it really doesn't - that's when I refund and get something else, but it's always within the first hour of listening.

Furthermore, Audible only lets you return 2-3 books self-serve before you have to go through customer service. This small friction is a real impediment to abuse of the system, and I highly doubt Audible won't refuse returns if you return one every month.

I think I've returned 4-5 books total, out of 62 over the last 6 years[1]. All were because either I really didn't like the book, or the narration volume wasn't very well balanced (road noise means turning the volume up to hear the quiet parts, then getting your eardrums blasted out on the loud parts).

[1] It's hard to believe that I've spent 35+ entire days listening to audiobooks. That's nuts.

i believe the issue is that audible is marketed as allowing returns at _any_ time in the future, which is a pretty extraordinary return policy that leads to more subscribers. but then the producer has to shoulder the costs of this incredibly lenient return policy.

How is that different to deciding to sell your goods through Costco or Walmart and then complaining that their returns policy allows customers to return anything for any reason basically with no time limit if you complain enough?

Like, the author knows the policy if they decide to sell through Audible. It comes with a massive userbase, userbase which potentially exists because of a decent returns policy. If they think they can make more money on a platform which doesn't allow returns, then they are welcome to try - it's not like amazon has monopoly here, plenty of other places to buy and listen to audiobooks from.