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-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.)
It doesn't just deplete the pot, by driving the per-page price down, it discourages legitimate writers from making their books available via Kindle Unlimited.. which makes the overall program less attractive to customers.
Amazon needs to address this one before it enters the death spiral stage..
I don't buy music from iTunes/Amazon because they take ~30% of the sales cost, which is insane! Bandcamp only takes 15% (10% if you form an independent label with other artists and produce a volume of sales).
Clearly they built the simplest possible model (pay based on the last page seen) and fixing it is too much work for the little they make. KU is just another bullet point (look here, we have unlimited books) and the money is immaterial so investing as little as possible makes business sense. Why anyone would use KU knowing is is beyond my understanding.
The first order fix would be to simply having the Kindle use its internal timer to keep track of how long each book was read (with sanity checks on the server side to make sure a Kindle is not reporting more hours read than is possible) and use that as the metric to pay authors (by the hour).
The hackers will create thousands of virtual Kindles and have them report fake times, but that's a much higher hurdle than just flipping to the end of the book and hitting "sync". Amazon might also figure out ways to detect the fake "Kindles".
There are some other things Amazon can do to mitigate the problem. They can require a book to be published for at least a full month before paying out. This will give it time for normal people to detect the fraud and report it, albeit at the cost of making the indie authors starve for an extra month.
Amazon could also hire a real person who's job is to scour all newly published titles for frauds. How many titles are published every day? Is it more than a person could spot check?
We did it at Leanpub, and I'm pretty sure we were just following what the Prags and (if I remember correctly) O'Reilly were doing.
The reason was that opening an epub and flipping through a long ToC before you get to the book is really annoying. There is a way to set the "starting page" in epubs, but many ebook readers ignored this at the time and just opened at the title-page, so putting the ToC at the end was just a better reader experience.
Now that most e-readers use the start-page setting properly, ToCs are mostly at the beginning of ebooks.
(Trust me on this: I've known him in meatspace for about 15 years and he's simply not technically-minded enough to be trying to game the system: he's a novelist, not a programmer.)
Given that Kindle Unlimited is available in France (according to http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...), I wonder what they do...
Especially as none of Walter Jon Williams books seem to be in kindle unlimited
That part probably seems far more relevant as an Amazon customer than it does to me as an Amazon employee. It'd be like saying "I got a parking ticket the day after I filed my tax return."
It's a shitty coincidence, but only that.
The technology is now just coming around to the book industry.
With file sharing, no the sharers make no money (except websites that show ads), and people discover new content that they enjoy.
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.
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.
If a person is willing to sign up to unlimited just to read one authors books once a month, that means those books are that much more valuable.
For the person who reads a lot - if he wouldn't have gotten unlimited unless he got that much volume in reading material that means each of his views are worth less than the other guys.
Utility of page views are not equal.
In flat fee unlimited subscription models there is no way to escape this. Some subscribers are going to consume more content than others but they all pay the same amount. The alternative is the pay per use model which Amazon has been offering since 96 or something and has existed in bookstores for decades.
If anything this makes it feasible for authors that have loyal fans but not widely popular content to be able to make a money.
Additionally, I think your first two points mostly address the outliers on the bell curve.
It seems to me that GP's solution would be at least somewhat more fair than the current system although its certainly not perfect.
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.
EDIT: To put some numbers on it, here's my KDP dashboard: 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.
But they don't charge you anything to store the book, right? Charging something for the download is presumably necessary to discourage gaming the system and the rate chosen is meant to encourage books they consider the right size which may penalize (intentionally or not) image-laden books.
I'm not arguing that that Amazon's policies are right or that "Unlimited" makes sense for authors (or readers), just that there are good reasons to charge something.
> On AWS, you're charged $0.15/TB of bandwidth out
Where did you get that? Data out starts at $0.09/GB, goes down to $0.05/GB for big customers and presumably can go down even further for even bigger customers but not 300x cheaper.
https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
Amazon charges are $x.xx/GB. Providers which compete on bandwidth costs charge $x.xx/TB.
300x cheaper than Amazon is a little difficult, but 50-100x cheaper is a price at which bandwidth can be profitably sold.
Do Kindles still use whispersync, where they get to use cell network connections for free but at very low rates? Even if it's no longer in use, maybe the pricing is still a holdover from that which people haven't noticed.
$0.15 per MB is to cover "free" 3G downloads also when roaming.
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.
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:!...
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.
Meet the new boss... same as the old boss.
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.
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?
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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.
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.
The issue is that the platform uses "minutes listened" or "pages read" as a proxy for "interest" or "value brought to the platform". Because these proxies are measured poorly, lazily, or have exploitable loopholes some content creators suffer for it.
In you specific example, Vulfpeck literally is taking money out of the pockets of their fellow content creators. There's a set amount of money in each payout pot. If they have their fans game the system to take a larger share than their "genuine" content would merit them then isn't that almost theft? Of course I don't really take issue with that. I take issue with the spotty (ha, get it) system that enables such behaviour.
He was 13 or 14 at the time.
I buy a lot of Kindle books but never seen any "Unlimited" offer, perhaps something that is US only?
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.
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.
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.
Fraudulent methods of measurement are a real issue in online marketplaces and you can't just say oops when you are sued.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, the scammers would just move on to using actual device farms but at least there would be some physical obstacles.
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.
Nowadays, if it involves money, for godsakes please assume the former.
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.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Amazon still has a stranglehold on the market and authors suffer for it.
Sigh. I guess I'll put that novel on the back burner, again.
What's an EIN?
it's the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I'm too conscious to depend on them.
I really wouldn't lump AWS in with it though. As long as you follow the rules and double up on things or accept the pretty-rare downtime they are really offering a good service at a pretty good price point. Google are probably a little cheaper for most things right now, but that tends to run in 6 month cycles.
What do you use instead?
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.
