Corporate Sector > What are Amazon doing now? [Public]
What Amazon Needs To Change
Post-Crisis D:
What if Amazon is waiting to see how AI issues work out?
If copyright and court cases and such work in AI's favor, what's to stop Amazon from using its own AI authors? No need to pay 70% royalties if they "own" the "author." Instead of 30%, Amazon would get to keep about 100%. Plus, real authors will likely continue to run AMS ads, probably until Amazon has a sufficiently quantity of Amazon-AI-written books that they can promote in place of AMS ads.
Depending on how the AI issues work out, Amazon might have little incentive to change how things work for real authors.
LilyBLily:
--- Quote from: Post-Crisis D on October 03, 2023, 05:09:17 AM ---What if Amazon is waiting to see how AI issues work out?
If copyright and court cases and such work in AI's favor, what's to stop Amazon from using its own AI authors? No need to pay 70% royalties if they "own" the "author." Instead of 30%, Amazon would get to keep about 100%. Plus, real authors will likely continue to run AMS ads, probably until Amazon has a sufficiently quantity of Amazon-AI-written books that they can promote in place of AMS ads.
Depending on how the AI issues work out, Amazon might have little incentive to change how things work for real authors.
--- End quote ---
Amazon won't make any ad revenue from publishing its own AI books.
Post-Crisis D:
--- Quote from: LilyBLily on October 03, 2023, 05:20:19 AM ---
--- Quote from: Post-Crisis D on October 03, 2023, 05:09:17 AM ---What if Amazon is waiting to see how AI issues work out?
If copyright and court cases and such work in AI's favor, what's to stop Amazon from using its own AI authors? No need to pay 70% royalties if they "own" the "author." Instead of 30%, Amazon would get to keep about 100%. Plus, real authors will likely continue to run AMS ads, probably until Amazon has a sufficiently quantity of Amazon-AI-written books that they can promote in place of AMS ads.
Depending on how the AI issues work out, Amazon might have little incentive to change how things work for real authors.
--- End quote ---
Amazon won't make any ad revenue from publishing its own AI books.
--- End quote ---
They wouldn't need to.
Right now, the average author gets about 70% of their list price. Amazon gets the other 30%. But, Amazon also gets a delivery fee which comes from the author's 70%. And, if the author runs AMS ads, Amazon gets that too. That doesn't come directly from the author's 70% as it is billed separately, but it effectively reduces that 70% and Amazon gets that amount.
With its own AI-written books, Amazon gets all 100%. So, if AMS ads eventually go away, Amazon loses that AMS income, but makes up for it by keeping 100% of the AI book money.
It's not unlike if you were selling stuff from your website. If you have a small number of items, you might run ads (as an Amazon affiliate, or Google ads, or anything similar) for other things in the hopes that if someone doesn't buy something direct from you, they will click an ad and buy something there. With Google, you get paid per click; as an Amazon affiliate, you get a small percentage of the sale. As your own store grows, in time it may be more cost-effective to advertise your own products in those ad slots rather than Amazon/Google/whatever ads. You might slowly reduce the number of third party ads or you might drop them all at once depending on your strategy. Either way, you wouldn't do that until sales on your own site justified using that space to advertise your other products rather than sending people to another site.
Amazon could utilize the same kind of strategy. They could continue AMS ads until they have built up an inventory of Amazon-AI-written books that would make it more profitable to use that ad space to push their AI-written books rather than let authors buy AMS ads.
TimothyEllis:
--- Quote from: Post-Crisis D on October 03, 2023, 05:09:17 AM ---If copyright and court cases and such work in AI's favor, what's to stop Amazon from using its own AI authors? No need to pay 70% royalties if they "own" the "author." Instead of 30%, Amazon would get to keep about 100%. Plus, real authors will likely continue to run AMS ads, probably until Amazon has a sufficiently quantity of Amazon-AI-written books that they can promote in place of AMS ads.
Depending on how the AI issues work out, Amazon might have little incentive to change how things work for real authors.
--- End quote ---
I Amazon did that, all one of the other majors would need to do is ban AI completely, and all the authors feeling the pinch on Amazon would go there. Add in some incentives to unpublish from from Amazon completely, and Authors would walk.
Amazon would overnight become a ghost town with a reputation of just having AI drek and the worst of the human author stuff. Going back to it's original reputation of being all the rejects from publishers, and horrible quality.
Readers would rapidly figure out all the quality books had moved to the AI banned site, and a lot of them would move there as well.
All in all, Amazon would be shooting itself in the foot by embracing AI books.
And KU would probably collapse very rapidly as authors of quality books abandoned Amazon completely.
Jeff Tanyard:
--- Quote from: TimothyEllis on October 03, 2023, 12:16:08 AM ---Put the also-bought slider back on every product page in all stores, in a prominent place.
--- End quote ---
--- Quote ---Seriously, retcon all the changes made after 2016. In fact, go back to the store we had in 2015, which actually worked to sell books.
--- End quote ---
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