Recent quotes:
The influencer lawsuit that could change the industry - The Verge
“I do think that there’s space and definitely enough money for everyone that’s in [the Amazon influencer] program,” she tells me as we sit on her cream sofa. After all, Sheil’s aesthetic is spare, bland, or, if you wanted to be ungenerous, you could call it basic. It’s a look and feel so commonplace on the internet that I can’t imagine anyone claiming ownership over it, especially in a legal context. The next day, I fly to meet with Sydney Nicole Gifford, 24, the Amazon influencer that is suing Sheil, at her home outside of Minneapolis. Gifford and her mother, Laura, greet me at the door. They are enthusiastic and inviting. Stepping inside, I am overwhelmed by a familiar palette: alarmingly neutral, not a single speck of color in sight. The house is still and silent, a vessel for content creation. In other words, it’s like I never left Sheil’s house — someone just shuffled the pieces around and plopped me onto a different set.Announcing ICD-10-CM and RxNorm Ontology Linking for Amazon Comprehend Medical
Medical ontologies, such as ICD-10, make it possible to classify unstructured medical information into standardized codes that downstream healthcare applications, such as revenue cycle management tools (medical coding) can read. Amazon Comprehend Medical ICD-10-CM RXNorm Ontology Linking extracts medical condition and medication entities from medical text and links them to the relevant ICD-10-CM and RXNorm concepts respectively. Using Amazon Comprehend Medical ICD-10-CM and RXNorm Ontology Linking APIs, developers can quickly and accurately extract codes (e.g. “R51” as the ICD-10-CM code for headache) from a variety of data sources, such as doctor’s notes or patient health records. Our deep learning approach to ontology linking provides much higher accuracy than existing rules-based systems by understanding the context each entity is found in.Real-time personalization and recommendation | Amazon Personalize | AWS
Delivering personalization to individuals at scale requires a combination of the right data and the right technology. The algorithms used by Amazon Personalize are designed to overcome common problems when creating custom recommendations – such as new users with no data, popularity biases, and evolving intent of users – to deliver high-quality recommendations that respond to specific needs, preferences, and behavior of your users.Amazon Claims to Accurately Measure Pages Read in Kindle Unlimited, Neglects to Mention There's no Standard Page Size | The Digital Reader
The thing is, folks, if one page in Book A is equal to 1.2 pages in Book B and 0.8 pages in Book C then it really doesn't matter how carefully Amazon counts the pages. Any count reported by Amazon is fundamentally bullshit because there is no single standard page size. Let me phrase it another way: Amazon's accounting system in Kindle Unlimited is broken on a fundamental level.We’re more than confirmation numbers: What I learned selling books to strangers - Salon.com
There are people who really need bookstores, people who I have come to know well. There’s the elderly woman who comes to every reading and sits in the front row. A professor visits in the afternoon to tell dirty jokes and he often brings challah to share. There is a therapist who works next door, and he buys and reads more novels than I would think is humanly possible or financially responsible. When one of our booksellers was snowed in overnight at work, the therapist let her sleep on his couch. There is a man who wears a leather cowboy hat, and he told me he almost never leaves his apartment except to come into the store. He always tips his hat to me before he leaves (really). And every Saturday, a father and his young son come in to buy a new Geronimo Stilton book, which is a series about an adventurous mouse. I eventually learned that the father was going through a divorce, and the bookstore was one of the things that both he and the little boy really looked forward to.Alexa: Amazon’s Operating System – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
In short, Amazon is building the operating system of the home — its name is Alexa — and it has all of the qualities of an operating system you might expect: All kinds of hardware manufacturers are lining up to build Alexa-enabled devices, and will inevitably compete with each other to improve quality and lower prices. Even more devices and appliances are plugging into Alexa’s easy-to-use and flexible framework, creating the conditions for a moat: appliances are a lot more expensive than software, and much longer lasting, which means everyone who buys something that works with Alexa is much less likely to switchEcho as hub came 'as a lark'
Connecting the Echo to Internet-enabled lightbulbs and thermostats made by other companies hadn’t been a focus within Lab126 until late 2014. On a lark, an engineer had rigged the speaker to work as a voice controller for a streaming TV device. It was a forehead-slapping moment for Bezos, according to one employee who worked with him directly. “It was something he grew to embrace, aggressively,” the person said. Amazon’s vision for the Echo now relies heavily on the speaker serving as a hub for the so-called smart home. Limp jokes that it’s only a matter of time before some enterprising developer writes a program to use the Echo’s voice controls to flush the toilet.Alexa 'always almost ready to ship'
Even as these fundamental changes went on, the lab’s leadership was convinced the speaker was almost ready. For three consecutive years, the product was expected to ship within six months. The $50 target price seemed more and more far-fetched.Amazon's secret patents
Amazon kept its fingerprints off the original patent applications. Instead, Rawles LLC was named the assignee—the organization that would own the patent. Rawles had been incorporated in Delaware just two weeks before Amazon started filing patent applications related to augmented reality. In the years since, Lab126 employees have applied for dozens of patents listing Rawles as the assignee, all relevant to augmented reality or voice control. No one has ever claimed Rawles as an employer on LinkedIn, and its correspondence with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been handled by lawyers based in Washington state, where Amazon is headquartered.What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You — Amazon strikes back
While we were talking, I also realized that you were envisioning a story that is basically a stack of negative anecdotes from ex-Amazonians. But if we were using that story form, we’d just come to you for responses and be done.Fake Amazon Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book
My book is the one in the lower right, and the the three I've outlined in red are rather interesting. Without them, I'd be in the number 9 slot. I realize that when you're not number one, other books are in front of you (well, duh), but why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?Bezos built Fire phone for himself
Bezos’s guiding principle for Amazon has always been to start with the needs and desires of the customer and work backward. But when it came to the Fire Phone, that customer apparently became Jeff Bezos. He envisioned a list of whiz-bang features, and the Tyto team started experimenting with a slew of promising technologies: near-field communication for contactless payments, hands-free interactions to allow users to navigate the interface through mid-air gestures, and a force-sensitive grip that could respond in different ways to various degrees of physical pressure. Perhaps most compelling was Dynamic Perspective, which uses cameras to track a user’s head and adjust the display to his or her vantage point, making the on-screen image appear three-dimensional.Amazon products are born as press releases
Like every product created at Amazon, the Fire Phone began on a piece of paper. Or rather, several typed, single-spaced pieces of paper that contained a mock-up of a press release for the product that the company hoped to launch some day. Bezos requires employees to write these pretend press releases before work begins on a new initiative. The point is to help them refine their ideas and distill their goals with the customer in mind.Amazon fosters a content glut to attract customers for other products
The problem, says Aaron Shepard, elaborating upon his “party’s over” blog post, is competition: There’s an enormous amount, given how easy it is to upload a book onto the Kindle. Even a niche that seems specialized—like soapmaking, the subject of a self-published book by Shepard’s wife, Anne Watson—faces dozens of competing Kindle titles. Meanwhile, Shepard says, Amazon has conditioned readers to pay next to nothing for books. “You need enough books to compensate for the lousy payoff. And of course, that’s a perpetual invitation to produce a lot at a lower level of quality. It’s a treadmill . . . What they [authors] generally don’t realize is that their treadmill is actually a generator, and it’s mostly for powering Amazon.” He explains: “Books have always been a loss leader for Amazon, a way to attract customers for more profitable items. So it suits Amazon very well to have an army of self-publishing authors, mostly working for pennies per hour, supplying Amazon with dirt-cheap content to keep customers coming to the site.”How Amazon promotes books
Amazon has “daily deals” and “monthly deals” in addition to countdown deals. It has its own “editors’ picks” and best-seller lists. All these regularly feature Amazon titles. Consumers who buy a certain type of book through Amazon, say a romance, will immediately get recommendations for similar books. Amazon Publishing romances are likely to be among them. Those who buy one will get an e-mail the next time its author comes out with a book. Like politicians who feel the press has betrayed them and want to bypass conventional means to get their message out, Amazon is largely bypassing traditional advertising and promotion that relies upon media and bookstores. “We’re focused on customers we can talk to directly,” Belle says.NYT best seller list excludes Amazon ebooks
It has not helped Amazon Publishing that most of its authors have been unable to get on The New York Times’ best-seller lists. While the Times tracks e-books, it does not look at titles “available exclusively from a single vendor,” according to its written policy. It is presumed that’s because the Times does not trust Amazon to report sales figures on its own titles without independent verification.The failure of Amazon Publishing (in NY)
The goal, says one former employee with knowledge of Amazon Publishing strategy and its execution, was to bid for "big books. We were going to compete with major publishers.” That seemed obvious from the man Amazon picked to run the New York office: Larry Kirshbaum, a former CEO of the Time Warner Book Group and discoverer of such literary luminaries as James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks. His defection to Amazon, as it was seen, was big news in the literary world—as were the six-figure advances he started handing out. Kirshbaum signed a few well-known names—self-help guru Timothy Ferriss, actress Penny Marshall, singer Billy Ray Cyrus. But the books did far worse than expected. Although Amazon had partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to release print versions of these and other titles, many bookstores simply wouldn’t sell them. Barnes & Noble announced its boycott in January 2012, casting the move as a retaliatory strike against Amazon’s actions in the e-book market. Amazon was pushing publishers, agents, and authors into making their titles available only on the Kindle, thereby undermining Barnes & Noble’s rival e-reader, the Nook. Other booksellers followed suit, angered in particular by a price-check app Amazon developed for the 2011 Christmas season that encouraged consumers to use stores as showrooms before buying online. “He was really fighting with one hand behind his back,” consultant Shatzkin says of Kirshbaum. The big names he signed—Marshall, Cyrus, and Ferriss—all wrote nonfiction books, and those were hard to sell in the e-book market alone. As the former staffer explains, “The nonfiction buyer is more studious, more reluctant to take a chance”—the kind of person who wants to see a book before buying it.Amazon Offers All-You-Can-Eat Books -- Authors Aghast.
“Six months ago people were quitting their day job, convinced they could make a career out of writing,” said Bob Mayer, an e-book consultant and publisher who has written 50 books. “Now people are having to go back to that job or are scraping to get by. That’s how quickly things have changed.”For romance and mystery novelists who embraced digital technology, loved chatting up their fans and wrote really, really fast, the last few years have been a golden age. Fiction underwent a boom unseen since the postwar era, when seemingly every liberal arts major set his sights on the Great American Novel.Now, though, the world has more stories than it needs or wants to pay for. In 2010, Amazon had 600,000 e-books in its Kindle store. Today it has more than three million.Bezos: books need to compete
The most important thing to observe is that books don’t just compete against books. Books compete against people reading blogs and news articles and playing video games and watching TV and going to see movies.Books are the competitive set for leisure time. It takes many hours to read a book. It’s a big commitment. If you narrow your field of view and only think about books competing against books, you make really bad decisions. What we really have to do, if we want a healthy culture of long-form reading, is to make books more accessible.Amazon pays readers with books for editing
Amazon wants to take some of the mystery out of predicting what books will sell with its new Kindle Scout publishing program, which lets readers vote on their favourite excerpts from unreleased books to determine what does (and what doesn’t) get published. Welcome to the court to common opinion, aspiring authors. In exchange for their participation in the program, Kindle Scout users will get free book credits, based on their ability to successfully pick winners. Those who nominate books that eventually get published will get a free Kindle version of the e-book a full week before publication day.Amazon offends the elite by flooding their market
Despite my benefitting from it, I am unwilling to pretend that this system is beneficial for readers or for writers who lack my privilege. […]The reason my fellow elites hate Amazon is that Amazon refuses to flatter our pretensions. In my tribe, this is a crime more heinous even than eating one’s salad with one’s dessert fork.The threat Amazon poses to our collective self-regard is the usual American one: The market is optimized for availability rather than respect. […] If Amazon gets its way, saying, “I published a book” will generate no more cultural capital than saying “I spoke into a microphone.”Two middlemen is too many? Try 3 or 4 layers in the book industry.
An investor in oDesk once said, “Two middlemen seems like one too many.” It was a pivotal statement that solidified the early focus on providing direct connections between employers and freelancers anywhere in the world. Everything we did in the early days of oDesk to support and benefit these direct connections paid off. Everything we did to accommodate other middlemen in the process was a waste of time. I’ll be the first to confess that I know basically nothing about the book publishing industry and look forward to being enlightened by readers’ comments. Until then, this is how I see it as a marketplace investor with Sigma West. Hachette is a middleman. So is Amazon. There should be only one.
With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.
We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. […] the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.
Amazon is not a “side.” Hachette is not a “side.” “Traditional publishing” is not a side, nor is “self-publishing.” Authors are not a “side.” Saying that any of them is a “side” is like saying cats are one side of mammals; it fundamentally misapprehends the nature of things.
While U.S. retailers took in more than $4 trillion in revenues according to the most recent U.S. Census, wholesalers brought in $7.2 trillion selling everything from Bunsen burners to toner cartridges. Even better for Amazon: Of America’s 35,000 distributors, almost all are regional, family-run companies pulling in annual revenues of $50 million or less, and only 160 have more than $1 billion in sales annually. […] Amazon, meanwhile, booked more than $74 billion in revenues last year, selling everything from beds to server time with a viruslike strategy that values opportunity and disruption above short-term profitability. […] AmazonSupply.com launched quietly in April 2012 with 500,000 items for sale. Two years later, with the site still officially in beta, that list of products has grown to more than 2.2 million–covering 17 product categories from tools and home improvement to janitorial supplies, stocking everything from 12-packs of Hawaiian Punch to schedule-40 stainless steel pipe. If 2.2 million products doesn’t sound like a staggering figure on its own, consider that the average wholesaler sells closer to 50,000 products online. […]