alt Hacker News>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
Replies
> If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
Many of us do. But the majority of ebook readers will: a)never find us and b)just want to click buy now not download epub (from a site they have never heard of) then transfer to kindle manually. So best to cover your bases and give them the Amazon option too.
Because Amazon gets millions of views per day, and their personal website gets a dozen or so. Literally the only reason.
This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
or use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.
> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
Some do!
https://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm