10 ms·

Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

627 points by monkeyprojects 10y ago

klagermkii 10y ago
I guess this is one version of what a micro-transaction powered Web could look like. Potentially even worse forms of click-bait becoming dominant.
- gcb0 10y ago
  the problem with that idea is that it's hard to counter abuse. in Kindle, they own everything on the device, they control it all. and still they manage to screw up. if Amazon implants micro payments for content on the browser somehow, where they don't control the whole stack, it is sure to be a even worse disaster. rest assured, no micro payment today is as bad and easy to scam as this joke.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  Wouldn't micropayments theoretically be done with 100% human interaction? (As in, I click on an article, like it, and click on the tip button?) Wouldn't that be relatively hard to actually game, short of actually stealing money from me?
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Who would bother to click the tip button? Why couldn't the site play games with the tip button by hiding it under other links or routing repeated clicks to it? If it requires human interaction, the simple fact that you've asked the user imposes a nuisance cost. There's a reason that app store purchase bottom tier of pricing floats around the $1 range and not the $0.01 range.
    - alanfalcon 10y ago
      Isn't that reason credit card processing fees?
    - wlesieutre 10y ago
      > There's a reason that app store purchase bottom tier of pricing floats around the $1 range and not the $0.01 range. I can't speak to Android, but on iOS the reason is that Apple has decided $0.99 will be the lowest price tier [1]. If they wanted to let people have an even crazier race to the bottom, I'm sure we'd see $0.49 apps and then $0.10 apps and $0.01 apps. With password entry there was a nuisance cost, but "scan your fingerprint" is pretty close to frictionless. Tapping the download button is the most difficult part of the transaction. [1] https://www.macstories.net/stories/a-beginners-guide-to-app-store-pricing-tiers/ https://www.macstories.net/stories/a-beginners-guide-to-app-...
- pjc50 10y ago
  Microtransactions enable microfraud .. which can then be algorithmically multiplied into losing serious money. The decisions "is this fraud" and "am I prepared to pay for this" end up needing to be taken by humans, because the automated systems can be endlessly probed for weaknesses and predictability.
domador 10y ago
Reward systems of any kind need to be very, very carefully designed, otherwise they are vulnerable to perverse incentives. Unfortunately, there can't be a single chink in the armor.
- Paul-ish 10y ago
  Companies that have complex ecosystems like this ought to start giving more though to mechanism design[1]. I would bet there are academics out there who would have a field day optimizing this sort of system. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
gcb0 10y ago
the retail side of Amazon is so sloppy. things like this. vendors much much worse than eBay for small items or sometimes even $600 smart phones... it's the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I'm too conscious to depend on them.
- pavel_lishin 10y ago
  > it's the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I'm too conscious to depend on them. What do you use instead?
- duaneb 10y ago
  Amazon isn't the one perpetrating the scam here....
  - msandford 10y ago
    > Amazon isn't the one perpetrating the scam here.... Not directly perpetrating, but definitely enabling. EDIT: Worse is that if you think about it, who is getting scammed? Is Amazon paying out more money by people doing all this crazy stuff with books? Probably not. So the scammers are scamming the real authors who aren't getting paid as much as they otherwise would for the real people who actually read their books. Does Amazon have any obligation to ensure that pages read are real, or verified or whatever? Probably not. But it's definitely bad business, similar to how Google desperately needed to crack down on click bots for Google ads.
    - duaneb 10y ago
      I would say its relation to vendor management is shaky at best. I am also curious what you think they should be doing better--I certainly do not waste my time shopping elsewhere on the internet. There is no reason in most cases: it is easier to wait for sales than it is to bargain hunt because everyone else is just as bad as amazon.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
feintruled 10y ago
In summary - Amazon pays all Kindle Unlimited authors out of a shared pot, the size of your share determined by the metric of "pages read" (and you thought your Kindle just reported that back for syncing purposes!). Enter the scammers - who make 3000 page fake books, page one containing an enticing link to the final page. This counts as having read the whole book!
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Wow! That's some incredible gross incompetence on part of the people at Amazon who designed this system, and those who QA'd it.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    That's the difference between people designing a system against a malicious adversary and a user. Nowadays, if it involves money, for godsakes please assume the former.
    - chaosfox 10y ago
      the system is still bad even without a malicious party, as said in the article, if the user go back to page 1 after reading the book the system will count the book as unread and the author will not get paid.
      - DanHulton 10y ago
        Pretty sure that's not true. They sync "furthest page read" not "last page read".
  - morley 10y ago
    How would you have fixed it? Assuming you implement the obvious thing -- tracking each page of a book the user has opened -- (a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode? (b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service? (c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period? (d) If Kindles don't already track page views this way, how do you update the software on all Kindles to start tracking this way? When do you switch your billing script to track purchases like that? (e) If you're QAing a Kindle and you spot this loophole, how do you do all these fixes? How long are you willing to keep the software from shipping? How certain are you that your theoretical solution is better than what's already shipped? Product development is hard, and it makes me angry when people handwave it as "gross incompetence" from a position of ignorance.
nateberkopec 10y ago
Ouch. I wrote a travelogue as a side project/on a bit of a lark, and I enrolled it in "KDP Select" (Kindle Unlimited). I make far more money, it seems, from full-price purchases than my per-page royalties from Kindle Unlimited. It really seems that it doesn't make sense for most authors, since the revenue-per-page is diluted by these scammers. EDIT: To put some numbers on it, here's my KDP dashboard: http://imgur.com/lDWoQQ6 http://imgur.com/lDWoQQ6 The book is $4.99, of which I receive 70% ($3.50). I sell about 3 copies per day (making about $10), and generally get ~350 pages read per day (making $1.50). So I make 10x on regular sales what I do on Kindle Unlimited. If it matters, it's a short book of ~300 Kindle-normalized pages. While writing this up, I realized Amazon charges authors $0.15 per megabyte of book file size per download. My book was 10 MB thanks to a bunch of photos. After extreme JPEG compression I was able to get it down to ~2MB or so. I wonder how many authors, like me, are losing 20% of their royalty without realizing it. On AWS, you're charged ~$0.09/GB of bandwidth out. How Amazon thinks 1000x pricing is fair here is beyond me.
- newman314 10y ago
  Market opportunity? =) BSO (Book Size Optimization)
- robhu 10y ago
  I would guess the high megabyte charge is there to encourage authors to keep their file sizes down, and the reason for this is presumably because Amazon have to pay for book downloads run through their 'Whispernet' (3G) Kindle service.
  - derefr 10y ago
    In other words, the charge is to incentivize people like nateberkopec to do exactly what they did: compress their JPEGs better.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Well that explains why Kindle books typically have maps that are so compressed they are completely illegible I guess.
Practicality 10y ago
It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to add a time on page metric before counting pages, especially when you own the hardware. I am honestly quite surprised this was missed.
- awqrre 10y ago
  Would that be user-generated data?
  - tamana 10y ago
    Sure but so far this scam is in fake books,not fake kindles. It's hard to move the needle with fake Kindle client accounts paying $10/mo each.
- fpgeek 10y ago
  Even easier (or as a first step), Amazon could count the pages that were actually displayed, not the ones that were skipped past. I'm pretty surprised they're not doing that already since it would be a good way to account for books of short stories where a reader might skip over some stories naturally.
nissehulth 10y ago
I read the whole article and didn't find any explanation what "KU" was. Now I find here that it means "Kindle Unlimited" but I still have no idea what it is. Some kind of subscription service? I buy a lot of Kindle books but never seen any "Unlimited" offer, perhaps something that is US only?
- nateberkopec 10y ago
  Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's "Spotify/Netflix for Books" product. $10/month to read any book enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program.
  - nissehulth 10y ago
    Thank you. I just tried to read more about it but all I got from amazon.com was "We're sorry. Kindle Unlimited is not available in your country. Please stay tuned.".
    - coldtea 10y ago
      Not sure what you mean. It's not in my country either, but I can easily access a page like: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002872331 http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002872331 Besides, there's always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle_Store#Kindle_Unlimited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle_Store#Kindle_Unlimited http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription/ http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...
cstross 10y ago
This scam isn't victimless. First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit real hard-working authors who supply a product people want. Secondly, Amazon react by trying to engineer algorithmic anti-scam measures, which end up catching the aforementioned hard-working authors instead of the scammers. For example: http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2016/03/amazon-may-they-choke-on-my-vomit/ http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2016/03/amazon-may-they-cho... (TLDR: Walter Jon Williams is a respected author, who has been bringing out his backlist of out-of-print novels as ebooks. Amazon's anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he'd released them and run a marketing campaign -- for the crime of having a table of contents at the end of the books. Because that was easier to automate than, say, collecting actual pages-viewed metrics as a basis for payment instead of just checking the last-page-bookmarked.)
- monkeyprojects 10y ago
  That's get little to do with this issue and more to do with Amazon insisting of formatting rules being met. Especially as none of Walter Jon Williams books seem to be in kindle unlimited
  - zodPod 10y ago
    It sure sounds like a great way to get people to turn to the way back of the book though too..
  - davidw 10y ago
    As someone with a side project doing formatting ( www.liberwriter.com ) I can confirm that the ToC is supposed to be near the front.
    - davidw 10y ago
      You can downvote all you want, but it's right there in Amazon's guidelines: https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGui... "Place the HTML TOC towards the beginning of the book and not at the end of the book. "
JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Scams like this are why we can't every have nice things. Not for very long anyway. Sigh. I guess I'll put that novel on the back burner, again.
- tamana 10y ago
  The only thing stopping you from writing a novel was KU?!
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    No, one of the motivations was thinking it could be easily marketed.
    - coolsunglasses 10y ago
      If the book isn't one of these guys http://cdn.movieweb.com/img.news.tops/NEdgXRU4ZlbPhg_2_b.jpg http://cdn.movieweb.com/img.news.tops/NEdgXRU4ZlbPhg_2_b.jpg trying to climb out of you, then the book ain't gonna get done whatever happens.
      - ansible 10y ago
        Yeah, I've got three stories banging around in the back of my mind. Sitting down in front of a screen (with nothing else asking for my time) to get bits into a file is hard for me.
andrewfromx 10y ago
this is like expert cheaters in a casino keep the casino security on it's game. The people pushing the edges of what counts as a "real page read" are forcing Amazon engineers to be more clever. But the article really assumes Amazon isn't doing anything sneaky and clever to filter out cheaters. Maybe the sales are low because they are low. And cheaters will always cheat and Amazon is "on this." But what authors need to do is write better? I'm quoting LCK, "be more funny" that's your only job as a comedy writer. Be more funny.
mfoy_ 10y ago
Isn't this payment scheme similar to Spotify's model? I thought that was broken too, considering some artists have 10min "silent" songs that they encourage their fans to play over and over during the night so they can get some more revenue. Why are services like this using such a fundamentally flawed model to pay their content creators? Why not just allocate funds based on users usage? Is it that much harder to implement? --- For those who aren't familiar with spotify, they also have a "pot" they pay out of, and they pay out based on your content's consumption (measured in minutes) as a percentage of all content consumed that payout period. So you could have one single Spotify subscriber who listens to your music 24/7 causing you to be paid more than than subscriber pays Spotify. Alternatively you could have a couple subscribers who listen exclusively to a single artist a few times a week and the artist will receive substantially less than those subscribers share of money, since other artists may have a more voracious fan-base.
- cwyers 10y ago
  With Spotify, the trouble is that paid listeners subsidize free listeners. Artists and labels are not going to consent to a plan where free listens cost less than paid listens.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I thought that was the way it worked.
- ar0 10y ago
  I think services are using such models because honestly they don't care very much. As the original article states itself, in a first iteration it's not Amazon who suffers but the legitimate author (same with Spotify, it's the legitimate musician who receives less due to this). These flatrate plans, where the authors receive a 'part of the pie' are actually a great deal for these companies, because a lot of business risk is transferred to the authors / musicians.
- nathancahill 10y ago
  By "some artists" you mean Vulfpeck's Sleepify album? A stun/statement about the flawed music royalties model, used to fund a free tour?
nxzero 10y ago
Sites down, Google Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
dandare 10y ago
Wow, Amazon is this cheap?
AJ007 10y ago
If this is correctly documented, there is no reason why Amazon would not have to pay out all the truly owed royalties to authors. Fraudulent methods of measurement are a real issue in online marketplaces and you can't just say oops when you are sued.
underwater 10y ago
I dabbled in subscribing to Kindle Unlimited, but quickly realized that most of the material there was just trash. It was like the literary equivalent of tuning out to some cheap reality TV show. Hearing that authors are paid per page explains a lot.
- jff 10y ago
  It was full of trash back when it was paid per "borrow" too. People would crank out dozens of 30-page erotica shorts per month, and each time one of those was read they got paid as much as the author of a 300-page novel. More, in fact, because IIRC the criteria for "user has read enough of the story, time to pay the author" was set as a percentage of the length... so the guy spamming shorts got paid after a page or two, but the novelist didn't get paid until the reader stuck it out through a couple chapters.
kirykl 10y ago
Paying per page and requiring exclusivity seem like a recipe for terrible content.
ilamont 10y ago
Self-published authors who went “all in” with KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited are furious about this. You can see the discussion on Kboards: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,234330.0.html http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,234330.0.html A few days ago someone shared a link that showed the free KU books in one of the categories filled with scam books, but it looks like a lot of them have been removed: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_pg_97?rh=n:283155,n:!1000,n:25,n:16190,p_n_feature_browse-bin:618073011,p_n_publication_date:1250226011,p_n_feature_twenty_browse-bin:13054657011&page=57&bbn=16190&sort=date-desc-rank&unfiltered=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1460832033&tag=viglink20273-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_pg_97?rh=n:283155,n:!... The other issue this brings up is how Amazon has been pushing authors to join KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited and the Spotify-style payout structure. It’s a raw deal for most authors, the exception being prolific/well-known authors (and the scammers). Anyone joining the program gets some nice marketing tools, but they have to remove their books from other marketplaces (Google Play, iBooks, etc.) and end up cannibalizing the sale of digital downloads which pay more (typically 70% of list for titles priced $2.99 and above). Like Spotify, Kindle Unlimited is great for audiences and the platform owner. The publishers/creators who can scale do OK. Everyone else gets the scraps.
- wmeredith 10y ago
  >Like Spotify, Kindle Unlimited is great for audiences and the platform owner. The publishers/creators who can scale do OK. Everyone else gets the scraps. Meet the new boss... same as the old boss.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > It’s a raw deal for most authors, the exception being prolific/well-known authors I've been reading almost exclusively authors I've never heard of before (but they are rated fairly high). In that respect, you may be right and they may have been known, but they were unknown to me. Usually I would stick to my own short list of who I think are the best in a genre, occasionally venturing outside of that to see who's getting accolades recently. I imagine if you put some effort into it and got a push from some fans you could break into a wider audience on KU without too much work.
kbenson 10y ago
This is a very old scam. Twenty years ago, my little brother did something essentially the same with pay-per-click ads and an IRC chat room of people that would all click on each others ads (or more likely there was a bot that did it for them). My little brother was getting multiple checks each week for $50-$150 until his account with most the ad networks was terminated five to six weeks in. He was 13 or 14 at the time.
kcorbitt 10y ago
I don't think the right solution is to track pages read better. That would make the scam a bit harder (because scammers would have to either manually turn pages or fake the client software), but is still pretty easily defeatable. A couple of things that Amazon could do to fix this behavior: 1. Instead of putting all KU subscriptions in a big pot and then dividing the pot among all authors by page read, divide the income from each individual subscriber among the pages he/she reads (so a read from a user who reads less would effectively be worth more). That way spammers who join collectives to read each others' giant books are just taking money from each other instead of stealing from the larger pot. 2. Don't pay out revenue for pages read until 2-3 months after the fact, and if a book is determined to be spam during that time withhold all revenues. This admittedly affects legitimate authors as well, but maybe Amazon could soften the blow by contributing the spam-attributed portion of the KU revenue back to the author pot so all the legitimate authors get a nice little bonus for their patience. Note that either/both options might require renegotiating contracts with KU program authors, but if the spam problem is as bad as it sounds I can't imagine most legitimate authors objecting.
- kevincox 10y ago
  Exactly, if you divide the pot per-user then a scammer who opens an account can only make their own money back (minus amazon's cut) making a scam like this a non-starter. Next they can try to trick legitimate readers, which was mentioned in the article. But that can be mitigated by actually counting pages read. Because tricking a legitimate reader is click through pages of garbage is going to be a hard sell. Next you have to worry about account hijacking but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
- kbenson 10y ago
  > Instead of putting all KU subscriptions in a big pot and then dividing the pot among all authors by page read, divide the income from each individual subscriber among the pages he/she reads (so a read from a user who reads less would effectively be worth more). There's a few side-effects to this, some may be beneficial depending on your point of view, others not. - People who read more are paying less to each author than those who read less. I might find an author I like, and voraciously consume thousands of pages of her works in a month. My total payout to her would be the same monthly fee. Popular and/or good authors shouldn't be penalized. - What happens to the monthly fees for people that don't read anything that month? Does Amazon get to keep it? - It runs the risk of incentivizing click-bait titles and synopsis, which may cause readers to think most the content on the platform sucks, and leave. Everybody is worse off if the platform fails entirely. In the end, Amazon wants a market where good authors can get paid, so they'll come, and they want good authors because that will attract subscribers, which is how Amazon gets paid. Pairing subscribers with authors they like, and allowing an exchange of money for services as frictionless as possible is in the best interest for all the legitimate actors here, so hopefully Amazon will find a better solution soon.
xbmcuser 10y ago
Amazon has been pulling books with the table of contents at the end for a few weeks now and has also informed the authors. So this scam is no longer workable.
- natdempk 10y ago
  How does this ruin the scam? Couldn't the scammers just put other enticing page links that link to the end of the book and have the same effect? Is there something I'm missing here?
- ArnoldP 10y ago
  And now watch for a glut of 'Choose your Own Adventure'-style books on KU.
Gratsby 10y ago
This is very interesting. My son like most kids in his age range is a minecraft junkie. He blew through a series of Minecraft diaries - very short pages, very simple reading, but it entertained him. He read more than 20 of them in a week before I went and got Kindle Unlimited, and blew threw another 20 of them once I did. It was obvious to me that the books were spam of sorts - but I figured it was to make money on $2-$4 purchases. It wasn't just one author, there was a series of similar book series. Now I have an understanding of what's taking place. They are targeting kids like my son who can churn through pages like it's his job because it basically is. I'd rather him be reading ANYTHING than nothing. Once you develop a love for it, it turns into a lifelong joy instead of a punishment that you have to suffer through during school. I really don't like how kids are targeted as revenue streams these days. I feel like there needs to be an awareness campaign targeting soccer moms so they are made aware of all the channels that are aggressively focused on making money off of elementary-school aged children. (endless youtube channels, video games, addictive mobile games, web games, etc.) There is a giant hole in the marketplace for engaging and fun educational experiences that can be had for an annual subscription that doesn't try to monetize kids throughout the day. There are a lot of "free" educational options that don't have the quality or engagement that kids want. There are a handful of quality ones, but there really needs to be a market-leading presence that small/startup businesses can emulate and aspire to. The money is there in the market but nobody is attacking it properly.
- jandrese 10y ago
  Is that really any worse than the dime store pulp novels of old?
obsurveyor 10y ago
Who is writing these horrible systems for Amazon? From the article, the way they detect page reads sounds like the simplest use case that a novice developer would come up with. Kindles can definitely record information and upload it later when there's a chance to sync; I use it all the time to submit corrections for books. There's no reason that it should be this simple to game. Of course, the scammers would just move on to using actual device farms but at least there would be some physical obstacles.
c2380 10y ago
adsasd
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
studentrob 10y ago
This is another reason the court's decision to fine Apple over the iBookstore and its publisher agreements was such a shame. Amazon still has a stranglehold on the market and authors suffer for it.
Theo59 10y ago
Stating the obvious here but the difference from monetising music streaming services is that you don't consume the content over a live connection hence the current Amazon model is just plain flawed. I personally would adapt to something much much simpler than guessing thousands of page views sharing thousandths of pennies. KU subscribers pay £10 pm for up to 10 books at a time. After the commission just share the remaining £7 amongst the other books held during the month. None of this funky pageview stuff. That way the scammers would only be taking from their own subscription fees.
AndrewUnmuted 10y ago
I was a founding member of the ACX service, which is a partnership of sorts between Amazon's Audible and KDP properties. It allows self-published authors to have audiobooks made by voice actors of _highly_ varying degrees of talent + expertise, which then get sold on Amazon/Audible. As the manager of the Audio QA team and its related internal technology services, I saw this kind of scammery on a daily basis. Amazon has actually a very weak policy against these kinds of scammers, because getting someone kicked off of the service for this kind of thing requires a lot of expensive and time-consuming legal work. Amazon likes avoiding this consequence whenver possible. And yes, audiobook voice actors would try to turn all kinds of scams on us - from robo-voicing entire narrations, to resubmitting a prior-recorded audiobook under a different title and author credit. When you open your media library to the dastardly UGC (user-generated content) world, these things will happen. The fact is that Amazon has become successful in monopolizing both book and audiobook distribution because they have figured out how to devalue the experience _just_ enough to extract as much scale as possible to out-perform the competition.
djrogers 10y ago
Wouldn't it make sense for Amazon to hold payouts for 30-60 days on new accounts, and require books to be available for 30-60 days before a payout? It seems a huge part of this scam is pulling your book from the store before you get caught - make that part impossible and he scammers will have to work a lot harder. There are ways around anything for a determined scammer, but those all have an associated cost, and if you make the costs high enough many of the scammers will go away.
teh_klev 10y ago
> then he or she won’t get their money for this EIN What's an EIN?
sireat 10y ago
What is ridiculous that while these kind of KU scams abound a legitimate publisher is still unable to publish on KDP (where people pay real money for a real e-book whole) unless your language is one of the chosen few: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119 https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119 It took forever to get Welsh added to the list and after that no change for the past 4-5 years on Amazon KDP. Finnish is fine, but Estonian is not. Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian are deemed unreadable by Amazon KDP despite rendering just fine sideloaded on my Kindle. It is beyond infuriating. I have edited multiple books for a non-profit organisation to publish on Amazon Createspace, that is the print-on-demand division. No problem on Amazon print-on-demand you can publish in Klingon if you want, but every time I choose to publish the same book on KDP(KDP is half-assedly integrated into Createspace Dashboard) my books get thrown back programmatically after a few days because too much of the text is in an unsupported language. The official Amazon reason for refusal to publish these same books on Kindle is because they feel the user experience in unsupported languages would be substandard. In other words Amazon are either incompetent and understuffed or mostly just do not care about publishing in niche languages. I suspect it is the latter since I doubt the former. This is despite the book rendering just fine on my Kindle privately I just can't publish it on KDP. I apologize for the rant, but it irks me that Amazon a company which is supposed to care about book publishing is so blase about it.
jcslzr 10y ago
It should be divided by user. Let say the service costs 10 usd per month. So lets say you are going to pay 5 usd to authors. You should divide each user 5 dollars between the percentage the user read of each autor, so if a user only read one author, then the author gets 5 usd. And if he reads 80% of one and 20% of other authors, then the same percentage should be applied from the 5 usd. I do not know how hard would be this to implement.

627 points by monkeyprojects 10y ago

I guess this is one version of what a micro-transaction powered Web could look like. Potentially even worse forms of click-bait becoming dominant.

gcb0 10y ago
the problem with that idea is that it's hard to counter abuse. in Kindle, they own everything on the device, they control it all. and still they manage to screw up. if Amazon implants micro payments for content on the browser somehow, where they don't control the whole stack, it is sure to be a even worse disaster. rest assured, no micro payment today is as bad and easy to scam as this joke.
pavel_lishin 10y ago
Wouldn't micropayments theoretically be done with 100% human interaction? (As in, I click on an article, like it, and click on the tip button?) Wouldn't that be relatively hard to actually game, short of actually stealing money from me?
- pjc50 10y ago
  Who would bother to click the tip button? Why couldn't the site play games with the tip button by hiding it under other links or routing repeated clicks to it? If it requires human interaction, the simple fact that you've asked the user imposes a nuisance cost. There's a reason that app store purchase bottom tier of pricing floats around the $1 range and not the $0.01 range.
  - alanfalcon 10y ago
    Isn't that reason credit card processing fees?
  - wlesieutre 10y ago
    > There's a reason that app store purchase bottom tier of pricing floats around the $1 range and not the $0.01 range. I can't speak to Android, but on iOS the reason is that Apple has decided $0.99 will be the lowest price tier [1]. If they wanted to let people have an even crazier race to the bottom, I'm sure we'd see $0.49 apps and then $0.10 apps and $0.01 apps. With password entry there was a nuisance cost, but "scan your fingerprint" is pretty close to frictionless. Tapping the download button is the most difficult part of the transaction. [1] https://www.macstories.net/stories/a-beginners-guide-to-app-store-pricing-tiers/ https://www.macstories.net/stories/a-beginners-guide-to-app-...
pjc50 10y ago
Microtransactions enable microfraud .. which can then be algorithmically multiplied into losing serious money. The decisions "is this fraud" and "am I prepared to pay for this" end up needing to be taken by humans, because the automated systems can be endlessly probed for weaknesses and predictability.

domador 10y ago

Reward systems of any kind need to be very, very carefully designed, otherwise they are vulnerable to perverse incentives. Unfortunately, there can't be a single chink in the armor.

Paul-ish 10y ago
Companies that have complex ecosystems like this ought to start giving more though to mechanism design[1]. I would bet there are academics out there who would have a field day optimizing this sort of system. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design

gcb0 10y ago

the retail side of Amazon is so sloppy. things like this. vendors much much worse than eBay for small items or sometimes even $600 smart phones... it's the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I'm too conscious to depend on them.

pavel_lishin 10y ago
> it's the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I'm too conscious to depend on them. What do you use instead?
duaneb 10y ago
Amazon isn't the one perpetrating the scam here....
- msandford 10y ago
  > Amazon isn't the one perpetrating the scam here.... Not directly perpetrating, but definitely enabling. EDIT: Worse is that if you think about it, who is getting scammed? Is Amazon paying out more money by people doing all this crazy stuff with books? Probably not. So the scammers are scamming the real authors who aren't getting paid as much as they otherwise would for the real people who actually read their books. Does Amazon have any obligation to ensure that pages read are real, or verified or whatever? Probably not. But it's definitely bad business, similar to how Google desperately needed to crack down on click bots for Google ads.
  - duaneb 10y ago
    I would say its relation to vendor management is shaky at best. I am also curious what you think they should be doing better--I certainly do not waste my time shopping elsewhere on the internet. There is no reason in most cases: it is easier to wait for sales than it is to bargain hunt because everyone else is just as bad as amazon.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

feintruled 10y ago

In summary - Amazon pays all Kindle Unlimited authors out of a shared pot, the size of your share determined by the metric of "pages read" (and you thought your Kindle just reported that back for syncing purposes!). Enter the scammers - who make 3000 page fake books, page one containing an enticing link to the final page. This counts as having read the whole book!

enraged_camel 10y ago
Wow! That's some incredible gross incompetence on part of the people at Amazon who designed this system, and those who QA'd it.
- ethbro 10y ago
  That's the difference between people designing a system against a malicious adversary and a user. Nowadays, if it involves money, for godsakes please assume the former.
  - chaosfox 10y ago
    the system is still bad even without a malicious party, as said in the article, if the user go back to page 1 after reading the book the system will count the book as unread and the author will not get paid.
    - DanHulton 10y ago
      Pretty sure that's not true. They sync "furthest page read" not "last page read".
- morley 10y ago
  How would you have fixed it? Assuming you implement the obvious thing -- tracking each page of a book the user has opened -- (a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode? (b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service? (c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period? (d) If Kindles don't already track page views this way, how do you update the software on all Kindles to start tracking this way? When do you switch your billing script to track purchases like that? (e) If you're QAing a Kindle and you spot this loophole, how do you do all these fixes? How long are you willing to keep the software from shipping? How certain are you that your theoretical solution is better than what's already shipped? Product development is hard, and it makes me angry when people handwave it as "gross incompetence" from a position of ignorance.

nateberkopec 10y ago

Ouch. I wrote a travelogue as a side project/on a bit of a lark, and I enrolled it in "KDP Select" (Kindle Unlimited). I make far more money, it seems, from full-price purchases than my per-page royalties from Kindle Unlimited. It really seems that it doesn't make sense for most authors, since the revenue-per-page is diluted by these scammers. EDIT: To put some numbers on it, here's my KDP dashboard: http://imgur.com/lDWoQQ6 http://imgur.com/lDWoQQ6 The book is $4.99, of which I receive 70% ($3.50). I sell about 3 copies per day (making about $10), and generally get ~350 pages read per day (making $1.50). So I make 10x on regular sales what I do on Kindle Unlimited. If it matters, it's a short book of ~300 Kindle-normalized pages. While writing this up, I realized Amazon charges authors $0.15 per megabyte of book file size per download. My book was 10 MB thanks to a bunch of photos. After extreme JPEG compression I was able to get it down to ~2MB or so. I wonder how many authors, like me, are losing 20% of their royalty without realizing it. On AWS, you're charged ~$0.09/GB of bandwidth out. How Amazon thinks 1000x pricing is fair here is beyond me.

newman314 10y ago
Market opportunity? =) BSO (Book Size Optimization)
robhu 10y ago
I would guess the high megabyte charge is there to encourage authors to keep their file sizes down, and the reason for this is presumably because Amazon have to pay for book downloads run through their 'Whispernet' (3G) Kindle service.
- derefr 10y ago
  In other words, the charge is to incentivize people like nateberkopec to do exactly what they did: compress their JPEGs better.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Well that explains why Kindle books typically have maps that are so compressed they are completely illegible I guess.

Practicality 10y ago

It doesn't seem like it would be that hard to add a time on page metric before counting pages, especially when you own the hardware. I am honestly quite surprised this was missed.

awqrre 10y ago
Would that be user-generated data?
- tamana 10y ago
  Sure but so far this scam is in fake books,not fake kindles. It's hard to move the needle with fake Kindle client accounts paying $10/mo each.
fpgeek 10y ago
Even easier (or as a first step), Amazon could count the pages that were actually displayed, not the ones that were skipped past. I'm pretty surprised they're not doing that already since it would be a good way to account for books of short stories where a reader might skip over some stories naturally.

nissehulth 10y ago

I read the whole article and didn't find any explanation what "KU" was. Now I find here that it means "Kindle Unlimited" but I still have no idea what it is. Some kind of subscription service? I buy a lot of Kindle books but never seen any "Unlimited" offer, perhaps something that is US only?

nateberkopec 10y ago
Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's "Spotify/Netflix for Books" product. $10/month to read any book enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program.
- nissehulth 10y ago
  Thank you. I just tried to read more about it but all I got from amazon.com was "We're sorry. Kindle Unlimited is not available in your country. Please stay tuned.".
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Not sure what you mean. It's not in my country either, but I can easily access a page like: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002872331 http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002872331 Besides, there's always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle_Store#Kindle_Unlimited https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle_Store#Kindle_Unlimited http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription/ http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...

cstross 10y ago

This scam isn't victimless. First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit real hard-working authors who supply a product people want. Secondly, Amazon react by trying to engineer algorithmic anti-scam measures, which end up catching the aforementioned hard-working authors instead of the scammers. For example: http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2016/03/amazon-may-they-choke-on-my-vomit/ http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2016/03/amazon-may-they-cho... (TLDR: Walter Jon Williams is a respected author, who has been bringing out his backlist of out-of-print novels as ebooks. Amazon's anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he'd released them and run a marketing campaign -- for the crime of having a table of contents at the end of the books. Because that was easier to automate than, say, collecting actual pages-viewed metrics as a basis for payment instead of just checking the last-page-bookmarked.)

monkeyprojects 10y ago
That's get little to do with this issue and more to do with Amazon insisting of formatting rules being met. Especially as none of Walter Jon Williams books seem to be in kindle unlimited
- zodPod 10y ago
  It sure sounds like a great way to get people to turn to the way back of the book though too..
- davidw 10y ago
  As someone with a side project doing formatting ( www.liberwriter.com ) I can confirm that the ToC is supposed to be near the front.
  - davidw 10y ago
    You can downvote all you want, but it's right there in Amazon's guidelines: https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGui... "Place the HTML TOC towards the beginning of the book and not at the end of the book. "

JoeAltmaier 10y ago

Scams like this are why we can't every have nice things. Not for very long anyway. Sigh. I guess I'll put that novel on the back burner, again.

tamana 10y ago
The only thing stopping you from writing a novel was KU?!
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  No, one of the motivations was thinking it could be easily marketed.
  - coolsunglasses 10y ago
    If the book isn't one of these guys http://cdn.movieweb.com/img.news.tops/NEdgXRU4ZlbPhg_2_b.jpg http://cdn.movieweb.com/img.news.tops/NEdgXRU4ZlbPhg_2_b.jpg trying to climb out of you, then the book ain't gonna get done whatever happens.
    - ansible 10y ago
      Yeah, I've got three stories banging around in the back of my mind. Sitting down in front of a screen (with nothing else asking for my time) to get bits into a file is hard for me.

andrewfromx 10y ago

this is like expert cheaters in a casino keep the casino security on it's game. The people pushing the edges of what counts as a "real page read" are forcing Amazon engineers to be more clever. But the article really assumes Amazon isn't doing anything sneaky and clever to filter out cheaters. Maybe the sales are low because they are low. And cheaters will always cheat and Amazon is "on this." But what authors need to do is write better? I'm quoting LCK, "be more funny" that's your only job as a comedy writer. Be more funny.

mfoy_ 10y ago

Isn't this payment scheme similar to Spotify's model? I thought that was broken too, considering some artists have 10min "silent" songs that they encourage their fans to play over and over during the night so they can get some more revenue. Why are services like this using such a fundamentally flawed model to pay their content creators? Why not just allocate funds based on users usage? Is it that much harder to implement? --- For those who aren't familiar with spotify, they also have a "pot" they pay out of, and they pay out based on your content's consumption (measured in minutes) as a percentage of all content consumed that payout period. So you could have one single Spotify subscriber who listens to your music 24/7 causing you to be paid more than than subscriber pays Spotify. Alternatively you could have a couple subscribers who listen exclusively to a single artist a few times a week and the artist will receive substantially less than those subscribers share of money, since other artists may have a more voracious fan-base.

cwyers 10y ago
With Spotify, the trouble is that paid listeners subsidize free listeners. Artists and labels are not going to consent to a plan where free listens cost less than paid listens.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I thought that was the way it worked.
ar0 10y ago
I think services are using such models because honestly they don't care very much. As the original article states itself, in a first iteration it's not Amazon who suffers but the legitimate author (same with Spotify, it's the legitimate musician who receives less due to this). These flatrate plans, where the authors receive a 'part of the pie' are actually a great deal for these companies, because a lot of business risk is transferred to the authors / musicians.
nathancahill 10y ago
By "some artists" you mean Vulfpeck's Sleepify album? A stun/statement about the flawed music royalties model, used to fund a free tour?

nxzero 10y ago

Sites down, Google Cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

dandare 10y ago

Wow, Amazon is this cheap?

AJ007 10y ago

If this is correctly documented, there is no reason why Amazon would not have to pay out all the truly owed royalties to authors. Fraudulent methods of measurement are a real issue in online marketplaces and you can't just say oops when you are sued.

underwater 10y ago

I dabbled in subscribing to Kindle Unlimited, but quickly realized that most of the material there was just trash. It was like the literary equivalent of tuning out to some cheap reality TV show. Hearing that authors are paid per page explains a lot.

jff 10y ago
It was full of trash back when it was paid per "borrow" too. People would crank out dozens of 30-page erotica shorts per month, and each time one of those was read they got paid as much as the author of a 300-page novel. More, in fact, because IIRC the criteria for "user has read enough of the story, time to pay the author" was set as a percentage of the length... so the guy spamming shorts got paid after a page or two, but the novelist didn't get paid until the reader stuck it out through a couple chapters.

kirykl 10y ago

Paying per page and requiring exclusivity seem like a recipe for terrible content.

ilamont 10y ago

Self-published authors who went “all in” with KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited are furious about this. You can see the discussion on Kboards: http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,234330.0.html http://www.kboards.com/index.php/topic,234330.0.html A few days ago someone shared a link that showed the free KU books in one of the categories filled with scam books, but it looks like a lot of them have been removed: http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_pg_97?rh=n:283155,n:!1000,n:25,n:16190,p_n_feature_browse-bin:618073011,p_n_publication_date:1250226011,p_n_feature_twenty_browse-bin:13054657011&page=57&bbn=16190&sort=date-desc-rank&unfiltered=1&ie=UTF8&qid=1460832033&tag=viglink20273-20 http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_pg_97?rh=n:283155,n:!... The other issue this brings up is how Amazon has been pushing authors to join KDP Select/Kindle Unlimited and the Spotify-style payout structure. It’s a raw deal for most authors, the exception being prolific/well-known authors (and the scammers). Anyone joining the program gets some nice marketing tools, but they have to remove their books from other marketplaces (Google Play, iBooks, etc.) and end up cannibalizing the sale of digital downloads which pay more (typically 70% of list for titles priced $2.99 and above). Like Spotify, Kindle Unlimited is great for audiences and the platform owner. The publishers/creators who can scale do OK. Everyone else gets the scraps.

wmeredith 10y ago
>Like Spotify, Kindle Unlimited is great for audiences and the platform owner. The publishers/creators who can scale do OK. Everyone else gets the scraps. Meet the new boss... same as the old boss.
kbenson 10y ago
> It’s a raw deal for most authors, the exception being prolific/well-known authors I've been reading almost exclusively authors I've never heard of before (but they are rated fairly high). In that respect, you may be right and they may have been known, but they were unknown to me. Usually I would stick to my own short list of who I think are the best in a genre, occasionally venturing outside of that to see who's getting accolades recently. I imagine if you put some effort into it and got a push from some fans you could break into a wider audience on KU without too much work.

kbenson 10y ago

This is a very old scam. Twenty years ago, my little brother did something essentially the same with pay-per-click ads and an IRC chat room of people that would all click on each others ads (or more likely there was a bot that did it for them). My little brother was getting multiple checks each week for $50-$150 until his account with most the ad networks was terminated five to six weeks in. He was 13 or 14 at the time.

kcorbitt 10y ago

I don't think the right solution is to track pages read better. That would make the scam a bit harder (because scammers would have to either manually turn pages or fake the client software), but is still pretty easily defeatable. A couple of things that Amazon could do to fix this behavior: 1. Instead of putting all KU subscriptions in a big pot and then dividing the pot among all authors by page read, divide the income from each individual subscriber among the pages he/she reads (so a read from a user who reads less would effectively be worth more). That way spammers who join collectives to read each others' giant books are just taking money from each other instead of stealing from the larger pot. 2. Don't pay out revenue for pages read until 2-3 months after the fact, and if a book is determined to be spam during that time withhold all revenues. This admittedly affects legitimate authors as well, but maybe Amazon could soften the blow by contributing the spam-attributed portion of the KU revenue back to the author pot so all the legitimate authors get a nice little bonus for their patience. Note that either/both options might require renegotiating contracts with KU program authors, but if the spam problem is as bad as it sounds I can't imagine most legitimate authors objecting.

kevincox 10y ago
Exactly, if you divide the pot per-user then a scammer who opens an account can only make their own money back (minus amazon's cut) making a scam like this a non-starter. Next they can try to trick legitimate readers, which was mentioned in the article. But that can be mitigated by actually counting pages read. Because tricking a legitimate reader is click through pages of garbage is going to be a hard sell. Next you have to worry about account hijacking but that's a whole different kettle of fish.
kbenson 10y ago
> Instead of putting all KU subscriptions in a big pot and then dividing the pot among all authors by page read, divide the income from each individual subscriber among the pages he/she reads (so a read from a user who reads less would effectively be worth more). There's a few side-effects to this, some may be beneficial depending on your point of view, others not. - People who read more are paying less to each author than those who read less. I might find an author I like, and voraciously consume thousands of pages of her works in a month. My total payout to her would be the same monthly fee. Popular and/or good authors shouldn't be penalized. - What happens to the monthly fees for people that don't read anything that month? Does Amazon get to keep it? - It runs the risk of incentivizing click-bait titles and synopsis, which may cause readers to think most the content on the platform sucks, and leave. Everybody is worse off if the platform fails entirely. In the end, Amazon wants a market where good authors can get paid, so they'll come, and they want good authors because that will attract subscribers, which is how Amazon gets paid. Pairing subscribers with authors they like, and allowing an exchange of money for services as frictionless as possible is in the best interest for all the legitimate actors here, so hopefully Amazon will find a better solution soon.

xbmcuser 10y ago

Amazon has been pulling books with the table of contents at the end for a few weeks now and has also informed the authors. So this scam is no longer workable.

natdempk 10y ago
How does this ruin the scam? Couldn't the scammers just put other enticing page links that link to the end of the book and have the same effect? Is there something I'm missing here?
ArnoldP 10y ago
And now watch for a glut of 'Choose your Own Adventure'-style books on KU.

Gratsby 10y ago

This is very interesting. My son like most kids in his age range is a minecraft junkie. He blew through a series of Minecraft diaries - very short pages, very simple reading, but it entertained him. He read more than 20 of them in a week before I went and got Kindle Unlimited, and blew threw another 20 of them once I did. It was obvious to me that the books were spam of sorts - but I figured it was to make money on $2-$4 purchases. It wasn't just one author, there was a series of similar book series. Now I have an understanding of what's taking place. They are targeting kids like my son who can churn through pages like it's his job because it basically is. I'd rather him be reading ANYTHING than nothing. Once you develop a love for it, it turns into a lifelong joy instead of a punishment that you have to suffer through during school. I really don't like how kids are targeted as revenue streams these days. I feel like there needs to be an awareness campaign targeting soccer moms so they are made aware of all the channels that are aggressively focused on making money off of elementary-school aged children. (endless youtube channels, video games, addictive mobile games, web games, etc.) There is a giant hole in the marketplace for engaging and fun educational experiences that can be had for an annual subscription that doesn't try to monetize kids throughout the day. There are a lot of "free" educational options that don't have the quality or engagement that kids want. There are a handful of quality ones, but there really needs to be a market-leading presence that small/startup businesses can emulate and aspire to. The money is there in the market but nobody is attacking it properly.

jandrese 10y ago
Is that really any worse than the dime store pulp novels of old?

obsurveyor 10y ago

Who is writing these horrible systems for Amazon? From the article, the way they detect page reads sounds like the simplest use case that a novice developer would come up with. Kindles can definitely record information and upload it later when there's a chance to sync; I use it all the time to submit corrections for books. There's no reason that it should be this simple to game. Of course, the scammers would just move on to using actual device farms but at least there would be some physical obstacles.

c2380 10y ago

adsasd

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

studentrob 10y ago

This is another reason the court's decision to fine Apple over the iBookstore and its publisher agreements was such a shame. Amazon still has a stranglehold on the market and authors suffer for it.

Theo59 10y ago

Stating the obvious here but the difference from monetising music streaming services is that you don't consume the content over a live connection hence the current Amazon model is just plain flawed. I personally would adapt to something much much simpler than guessing thousands of page views sharing thousandths of pennies. KU subscribers pay £10 pm for up to 10 books at a time. After the commission just share the remaining £7 amongst the other books held during the month. None of this funky pageview stuff. That way the scammers would only be taking from their own subscription fees.

AndrewUnmuted 10y ago

I was a founding member of the ACX service, which is a partnership of sorts between Amazon's Audible and KDP properties. It allows self-published authors to have audiobooks made by voice actors of _highly_ varying degrees of talent + expertise, which then get sold on Amazon/Audible. As the manager of the Audio QA team and its related internal technology services, I saw this kind of scammery on a daily basis. Amazon has actually a very weak policy against these kinds of scammers, because getting someone kicked off of the service for this kind of thing requires a lot of expensive and time-consuming legal work. Amazon likes avoiding this consequence whenver possible. And yes, audiobook voice actors would try to turn all kinds of scams on us - from robo-voicing entire narrations, to resubmitting a prior-recorded audiobook under a different title and author credit. When you open your media library to the dastardly UGC (user-generated content) world, these things will happen. The fact is that Amazon has become successful in monopolizing both book and audiobook distribution because they have figured out how to devalue the experience _just_ enough to extract as much scale as possible to out-perform the competition.

djrogers 10y ago

Wouldn't it make sense for Amazon to hold payouts for 30-60 days on new accounts, and require books to be available for 30-60 days before a payout? It seems a huge part of this scam is pulling your book from the store before you get caught - make that part impossible and he scammers will have to work a lot harder. There are ways around anything for a determined scammer, but those all have an associated cost, and if you make the costs high enough many of the scammers will go away.

teh_klev 10y ago

> then he or she won’t get their money for this EIN What's an EIN?

sireat 10y ago

What is ridiculous that while these kind of KU scams abound a legitimate publisher is still unable to publish on KDP (where people pay real money for a real e-book whole) unless your language is one of the chosen few: https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119 https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119 It took forever to get Welsh added to the list and after that no change for the past 4-5 years on Amazon KDP. Finnish is fine, but Estonian is not. Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian are deemed unreadable by Amazon KDP despite rendering just fine sideloaded on my Kindle. It is beyond infuriating. I have edited multiple books for a non-profit organisation to publish on Amazon Createspace, that is the print-on-demand division. No problem on Amazon print-on-demand you can publish in Klingon if you want, but every time I choose to publish the same book on KDP(KDP is half-assedly integrated into Createspace Dashboard) my books get thrown back programmatically after a few days because too much of the text is in an unsupported language. The official Amazon reason for refusal to publish these same books on Kindle is because they feel the user experience in unsupported languages would be substandard. In other words Amazon are either incompetent and understuffed or mostly just do not care about publishing in niche languages. I suspect it is the latter since I doubt the former. This is despite the book rendering just fine on my Kindle privately I just can't publish it on KDP. I apologize for the rant, but it irks me that Amazon a company which is supposed to care about book publishing is so blase about it.

jcslzr 10y ago

It should be divided by user. Let say the service costs 10 usd per month. So lets say you are going to pay 5 usd to authors. You should divide each user 5 dollars between the percentage the user read of each autor, so if a user only read one author, then the author gets 5 usd. And if he reads 80% of one and 20% of other authors, then the same percentage should be applied from the 5 usd. I do not know how hard would be this to implement.