Amazon Is Only Going To Pay Authors When Each Page Is Read 172
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has a new plan to keep self-published authors honest: they're only going to pay them when someone actually reads a page. Peter Wayner at the Atlantic explores how this is going to change the lives of the authors — and the readers. Fat, impressive coffee table books are out if no one reads them. Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in.
Tell me... (Score:2, Insightful)
How this is good for anyone but Amazon. Because I don't want EVERY book to be written as a page turner. Just as I don't want every book written from the same POV, or with the same set of characters. Doing things that could encourage a particular writing style isn't to my benefit as a reader.
Re:Tell me... (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume that a lot of e-books are the same way, and honestly, they're not priced well, and too many middle-men get in the way. e-books should be the author selling right to me. Call it the exact opposite of the music distribution model; author owns the work and potentially contracts-out editing and marketing, and retains all profit after costs are paid or shares profits as a percentage with editors and marketing depending on the arrangement that they come to.
That Amazon is involved as a middleman is itself a problem. There's no need for the author to sell to Amazon for them to then sell to me when there's no physical medium for e-books, and for traditional publishing, Amazon should just be another traditional retailer, not something special.
Re: Tell me... (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree but at the same time disagree - Amazon exists as a one-stop e-book shop and makes discoverability of similar authors/books etc. easier as well as managing the monies and distribution. Independent authors that are successful seem to do pretty well under the current model and therefore value is added. The new model is likely to destroy value - particularly for books being dipped in and out of.
Re: Tell me... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it is solely to make Amazon more money. The 'purchaser' doesn't pay less, but the writer gets paid less because Amazon just wants to pay them less.
Re: Tell me... (Score:5, Insightful)
The 'purchaser' doesn't pay less, but the writer gets paid less because Amazon just wants to pay them less.
That's it right there. If the reader turns the pages and you end up getting more at the end of the book, then I can work with that. But that's not what's happening. If someone buys your book and doesn't read it, you get squat but Amazon still gets paid.
It's kind of a ripoff for authors.
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without the 'kind of'
Re: Tell me... (Score:4, Interesting)
The 'purchaser' doesn't pay less, but the writer gets paid less because Amazon just wants to pay them less.
That's it right there. If the reader turns the pages and you end up getting more at the end of the book, then I can work with that. But that's not what's happening. If someone buys your book and doesn't read it, you get squat but Amazon still gets paid.
It's kind of a ripoff for authors.
What the OP doesn't mention is that there's a kind of "scam" on Amazon where people self-publish e-books on a broad variety of topics and give them promising descriptions. The books are usually somewhat short and/or heavily plagiarized, but the key is that the entity doing the self-publishing shotguns tons of them out there. Some even use automated systems to simplify the process...it's on that scale. They're all crap, mind you, but they're cheap, so a lot of people say "what the hell...how bad can it be?" and buy them. Five bucks here, five bucks there, and the books turn out to be worthless, so the people who buy them rarely read more than a few pages in. This is a means of changing the economics so that if you are a self-publisher and your book is total shit, you won't get paid.
A valid question would be, "What does Amazon care?" The issue is twofold: one, the Kindle users have a bad experience, which is bad for Amazon, and two, the crap books clog up the search results. Both of these are against Amazon's (and our) interests. Hence the desire to figure out a way to cull such things. And I like that Amazon's effectively taking themselves out of the decision loop on this...ultimately, it's a way that the readers get to decide, directly, whether or not the person who published the e-book should get their money.
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Re: Tell me... (Score:5, Informative)
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Why is this critical fact missing from the summary?! What the actual hell?
Re: Tell me... (Score:5, Interesting)
I mostly agree, though it generally feels safer to hand your CC details over to a reputable vendor like amazon than some anonymous author selling a book on the internet using who knows what means to store your personal information. And who knows if Joe Author is storing your payment details securely or not. Or whether it is just some author's nephew who knows how to install some web script on shared hosting.
Sure you can call the CC company and get the payment reversed, but it is more hassle than not having to do it.
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I'm selling stuff over the Internet myself, and give as payment options local bank transfer, credit card and PayPal. Credit cards go via PayPal: customers don't have to give me their credit card details (I never see this, I don't want to see it even as then I have to add all kinds of extra security measures). Works great.
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just because text books are expensive doesnt mean they should be. everyone in college would love it if text books were not 250$ a piece.
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I suppose that makes sense for something like an English book, which probably doesn't have to change all that often (although it would be nice if it did catch up with the times and cover newer literature and usage).
I'm not sure that I'd want a science textbook that had been sitting in a warehouse for ten years, though. Maybe not even five years, although I suppose the less specialized basic classes wouldn't really change significantly in a short time.
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First you claim Amazon shouldn't get in the way, should be out of the picture, and that there's no sense in having Amazon buy e-books from the author and then resell them. Then at the end of your message you say Amazon should be "just a traditional retailer".
Now this reselling is exactly what traditional retailers do, so here you contradict yourself. That Amazon happens to be in the digital sphere doesn't change the argument. Why should one have to go to the author directly for an e-book but not for a tradi
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Physical and e-books are pretty much equivalent these days, at least in this regard. Modern printing presses allow printing on demand [wikipedia.org], so all that's left is the logistics of having a catalog somewhere handling orders and se
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Re:Tell me... (Score:5, Informative)
This only applies to books read through the Kindle lending program where the author's all receive a part of the monthly pooled money based on the lending behavior. It is true of course that a 200 page book can provide as much value as a 500 page book to a particular reader. But let's assume that the author's effort is more for the 500 pages versus 200 pages (not always the case but probably true much of the time). This seems like a fairer way of distributing the Kindle lending money to me. I don't know anything about the lending program but hopefully authors have control over whether they participate or not.
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Mod Parent Up.
This has to do with ebooks in a particular program where many authors were abusing the system.
This is a good thing.
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Mod Parent Up.
This has to do with ebooks in a particular program where many authors were abusing the system.
This is a good thing.
No, it isn't. Even if there were no other ways to detect "lending abuse" by authors, that's no reason to spy on the reading habits of the readers.
If the fucking NSA were checking which pages of books you read, you'd be up in arms, but since its Amazon, it's okay.
Not to mention that the abusers will find a way to defeat that silly control scheme in no time anyway.
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I still don't want Amazon keeping track of which and how many pages I read. Maybe they're already doing that, and I haven't been paying attention.
Amazon "adds value" to ebooks purchased / downloaded from them by allowing you to highlight sentences, bookmark pages, add annotations, and continue reading from your last viewed page on another device. Evidently they can only do any of that if what you do with and within a book is tracked and uploaded to their servers.
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Re:Tell me... (Score:5, Informative)
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Well, this applies to self-published books read through their Kindle Unlimited Program.
I agree with your sentiment, but having read a number of self-published books, it wouldn't be fair to the better self-published authors to pay them the same rate per free book download as the worst ones. While some self-published stuff is as good as most traditionally published fiction (albeit usually needing a bit more proof reading), there's a vast body of stuff that consists of unreadable manuscripts dumped on the ebo
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The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America (Score:4, Funny)
Bad editors (Score:2, Interesting)
Did anyone even look at the post before putting it up?
Refund? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is the prorated cost of the unread pages refunded to the customer?
Re:Refund? (Score:5, Informative)
This is for the kindle "unlimited", so only borrows not buys. People were borrowing popular books, but never reading them. They also suspected that a reddit/forum brigade was borrowing without reading, so that a particular author could get money for a shitty book.
The only downside is a technical book where people are borrowing it only for 1 or 2 chapters.
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> The only downside
To me as a reader the bigger downside seems to be that my behavior is tracked, monitored and logged.
Another profiling shitshow that logs what you read, when you read, how long you read, which sections you skip, which you pay more attention to, etc.
Actual Working Link (Score:2)
Different middlemen, same story (Score:5, Interesting)
It's sad really. The promise of the web was that would be a tool for democratization, it would empower the individual, level the playing field. It was finally a chance for the individual to stake out a piece of ground and speak dirrectly to his or her audience. It turns out, however, that we all just handed the power over to different middlemen who now use more sophisticated tools to squeeze the artist back to a position of bare survival. So far this has been true in photography, music, and books. Probably more.
Re:Different middlemen, same story (Score:5, Insightful)
"It turns out, however, that we all just handed the power over to different middlemen who now use more sophisticated tools to squeeze the artist back to a position of bare survival."
As it came to a surprise.
This has been, more or less, a capitalist market (quite so, since it was a novelty). Even Adam Smith knew that leaving capitalism alone, it is the land owners the ones that extract the most rent, with farmers being left at the point of bare survival. Here the public is the land the author nurtures via her books -and the public nowadays is owned by Amazon. The more free market tools are thrown to me mixture, the more certain this kind of output is to be.
Re:Different middlemen, same story (Score:5, Informative)
We're getting all worked until over a summary that doesn't actually explain what's going on.
This is specific to Amazon's subscription services (e.g. Kindle Unlimited), and only affects how Amazon divvies up the fixed pool of money Amazon already allocates to reimburse authors whose works are being read as well art of those subscription systems. It used to be per-book; now it's per-page.
Also their service is optional (Score:3)
You don't have to have your stuff on their subscription services. It is up to the author (or publisher, whoever controls the copyright). You can have all, some or none of your stuff on their subscription services. However, many choose to have stuff on subscription because it helps people discover your stuff, and while you may not make a lot per view/listen, you make some and it can add up.
Pay per page view actually makes sense, as it helps reward authors that release stuff worth reading. If you do pay per b
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If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.
Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea
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If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.
I'd never claim to predict what the general public will do, but as someone who has a collection of thousands of books, I tried out e-books, and I have absolutely no interest in them. PDF copies of books -- sometimes. "E-books" as reflowing text, often badly formatted, with illustrations messed up? No thank you.
I will say that I read very little ephemeral fiction, though -- and for people who read that stuff, I completely understand the attraction to e-books. I can understand how e-books function as "d
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I have a similar sentiment as you: e-books are fine for "disposable" books. Books, mostly fiction but maybe also non-fiction (depending on which category you like to put those popular "self-management" and "self-improvement" books) that are read once, maybe twice, then put away to never leave the shelf again.
Those books are exactly what I would never buy, but borrow from the library. This would then logically also the kind of books people like to borrow rather than buy. Continuing this line of thought, with
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E-books are not synonymous with PDF. I like Kindle format because it works well for works you read sequentially, like novels, and because of the convenient purchase system, but there are a lot of other formats out there. We need one that is better suited for random access, for textbooks and reference works.
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If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public.
Yeah, that whole "selling ebooks below cost to drive the competition out of business while selling proprietary ebook-readers for far more than everybody else" business tactic sure worked fine. And as an Apple hater you of course love getting it up the ass from Amazon.
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"Selling e-books below cost," meet "E-books are too expensive."
As I mentioned above in the response to AC, Kindle format is great for anything you read sequentially, not so much for random access. I also like the ability to read at home on my iPad for a while and then later, when I'm standing in line at the pharmacy, be able to pull out my iPhone and see it automatically syncing the same book to where I left off on the other device. Can any of the other formats do that? As a lifelong reader, it's a real tre
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And what about the readers? (Score:2, Insightful)
Counting pages (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't going to affect the majority of books. It's strictly for the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Online Lending Library portions, where customers can read the book without buying it. Simply don't make your books available through those programs, or limit them to initial books in a series or those likely to hook readers into wanting more of your works. Basically juggle the benefits of KU/KOLL exposure generating additional sales vs. the potential cost in royalties.
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Simply don't make your books available through those programs
How long is that going to remain an option? There are very few companies that dominate a market that have any compunction about ordering their suppliers to jump through whatever hoops they feel are required to further their interests.
Given Amazon's status in the e-book world, how many non-best-selling authors will choose to kill 95% of their sales in order to stay out of the Library program is Amazon chose to make it mandatory if you wanted to s
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It'd be too easy for authors to set up an alternative Kindle store, for one thing. The DRM's well-understood and there's many options around for stripping the DRM off AZW* files, if it can be decoded it can almost certainly encoded as well. The only thing different for the customer would be having to enter the serial number of their Kindle by hand rather than having the Kindle upload it as part of the registration process like it does with Amazon. Or you can go the Baen route and publish without DRM. It wou
Don't see why you would not want something in (Score:2)
This isn't going to affect the majority of books. It's strictly for the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Online Lending Library portions, where customers can read the book without buying it. Simply don't make your books available through those programs
If you don't make your books available for the program, you get zero.
If you do, and they read even a few pages, you get something...
Frankly I'd really want to know if people were or were not reading all the way through books I wrote.
As a reader it would be great to
Privacy again (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well your honor, not only did the defendant purchase "How to murder your spouse", he read the page on poison techniques 37 times and only read the rest of the book twice. Since the autopsy indicates death by poison as described by the page in question, I rest my case.
And frankly, if that DID happen, then he probably DID kill his wife... and he should go to prison...
I fail to see the problem...
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Well your honor, not only did the defendant purchase "How to murder your spouse", he read the page on poison techniques 37 times and only read the rest of the book twice. Since the autopsy indicates death by poison as described by the page in question, I rest my case.
And frankly, if that DID happen, then he probably DID kill his wife... and he should go to prison...
I fail to see the problem...
The problem is this: he could have been reading that section while doing research on a mystery novel, acting as editor for that section of Wikipedia article on that book or just got interrupted a lot and had to go back. Or any number of other innocent actions. And because the data/metadata is likely not secure, anyone with access to it could have chosen death by poison as a way to frame him. Or the poisoning was accidental (particularly if the poison was a common household chemical). It could imply inten
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The problem is this: he could have been reading that section while doing research on a mystery novel, acting as editor for that section of Wikipedia article on that book or just got interrupted a lot and had to go back. Or any number of other innocent actions.
All true, but that is why the requirement to convict isn't "proof beyond all doubt", it is "proof beyond a reasonable doubt".
If the wife was murdered at home, the husband has no alibi, no one else's DNA was found, and the wife was killed in the manor in which the husband researched a week before and read 27 times...
That likely is plenty to get a conviction.
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It's up to a judge to decide what evidence is admissible and what isn't. Don't blame the existence of the evidence.
Uh (Score:5, Interesting)
Fat, impressive coffee table books are...
...not e-books.
Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in.
Why? Why wouldn't they have just as much control over the price-per-page as they currently do* over the price-per-book?
*which may not be much, or may be a lot. I don't know.
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Do you know that to be true, or are you just guessing?
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The AC is basically quoting directly from Amazon's email describing the change, so it's accurate. See all the other posts about this only being for the pool of money Amazon uses to pay for books borrowed through Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Lending Library.
Only "rented" books--headline/summary misleading (Score:5, Informative)
As is usual, the headline and summary are sensationalized at the expense of truth: Amazon isn't doing this for all Kindle books. They're doing it only for self-published Kindle books (i.e., not ones from actual publishing houses, which comprise the majority of books most people actually read), and even then it's not for books that are actually purchased: it's for books read as part of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited programs, which basically allow you to rent/check out participating books for "free" if you are in one of those programs (the former requires an Kindle reader or tablet from Amazon plus a Prime subscription, and the latter requires a monthly fee). Books people actually buy are unaffected, as are the vast majority of books in general even if they're rented. This is still an interesting model, but it's not as extreme as I thought from the Slashdot posting. I guess it would kind of be like Pandora negotiating a significantly lower royalty on songs that are skipped within the first few seconds.
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Not as bad as it sounds (Score:2)
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First of all, not all books are novels. Books of poetry, textbooks, how-to books, recipe books, reference books, books of short stories, sports books, bathroom reading, books of quotes, economics books, music texts, books of dirty jokes, and the novels of Marcel Proust are not "page turners".
I don't know where you come from, but yeah, yo
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The payment model is similar to Spotify and other streaming music services. They take a percentage of all the money from the Unlimited subscriptions and divide it among all the books that were read. But now they are changing it to instead divide among all the pages that were read. The payment per page will be lower than the previous payment per book, but the total amount of money given out will be equal.
Those great books are mostly not being offered through Kindle Unlimited. Most of what you can get is self
Alternate headline: Amazon tracks what you read (Score:5, Insightful)
In a message recently released to investors, Amazon has announced that its plans to improve targeted advertising will now utilize metrics gleaned from analyzing what eBook pages it's locked in market monkeys (IE The people who think that they are the customers) read, as well as how long they linger over each particular page. This will allow Amazon sell more highly targeted advertisements to its actual customers and thus tap a previously unavailable segment of analytics.
For example, the monkey reads a book that contains both an explicit sex scene and a restaurant scene. By timing how long the monkey takes to read each scene (and hopefully in the future each paragraph - along with eye movement measurements) Amazon will be able determine what sort of sex the monkey prefers as well as the types of food they like. Correlating this data with data obtained from other books the monkey has read, Amazon will be able to craft an individual marketing scheme that highlights the monkey's desire for blindfolds as well as chocolate lava cake.
Note that Amazon has been rumored to be in talks with Facebook about posting such campaigns to not only the monkey's FB feed, but also to the feed of their friends as well. This will have a synergistic sales effect of either the monkey's friends sharing the same taste (and thus opening up new markets), or the monkey paying to opt out of the campaign (in order to hide their behavior) - and thus bringing in more revenue . Amazon has already applied for a patent on paying to opt out of a marketing campaign and they have also started trialing the technology in some market segments in order to estimate how much value monkey's place on their privacy.
I do you know I read a page? (Score:2)
Maybe I'm a fast reader, faster than whatever reasonable setting the used in "displayed on the screen long enough to be parsed". Maybe my cat flips to a random page and leaves it on all night? On my Kindle I usually flip to the next page before going to bed. But even though I left the device auto shut-off on that page, I didn't read it. The lights were out and the Kindle was on my nightstand.
This is why every Kindle needs a credit card swipe. I should have to go through the physical act of swiping my credit
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I don't think the examples you cite will significantly affect the program. For instance, stalling on a page while you sleep doesn't do anything. Turning to a page today that you don't actually read until tomorrow doesn't do anything. Turning one more page, waiting until tomorrow, and then deciding the book is junk that you're not going to finish, gives the author credit for exactly one additional page read, which is a minimal difference in royalties.
E-books the size of coffee tables. (Score:2)
Unless they've discovered a way to insert retinal implants without our knowledge, I can only assume Amazon is referring to e-book sales here.
Therefore, the analogy of a "fat coffee table book" is a fucking stupid one, unless they start selling Kindles the size of coffee tables.
So they don't want reference materials or (Score:2)
educational materials to be published at all.
I buy a reference book and only read the chapter I need for a current job, then the author is only compensated for 1/20th of what I paid Amazon and Amazon gets the rest?
Someone sue Amazon publishing so hard that they can't find their god damn feet ok?
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educational materials to be published at all.
I buy a reference book and only read the chapter I need for a current job, then the author is only compensated for 1/20th of what I paid Amazon and Amazon gets the rest?
Someone sue Amazon publishing so hard that they can't find their god damn feet ok?
How many reference books and textbooks are by self published authors and are part of the subscription-based lending library for ebooks?
Oh, you thought this applied to all ebooks amazon sells?!
Well, I guess the click bait headline does sort of suggest this, but no, as usual the summary is woefully bereft of proper facts.
An idea... (Score:4, Insightful)
This system would allow everyday people to sell used ebooks at whatever the market would bear. The downside is in a system like this, reading habits are traceable by all. However, if you wanted to buy "IEDs for terrorist Dummies" you probably wouldn't want to use this system.
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Or, you know, stick to the tried and true method of "once it's bought, the seller and author are right the fuck out of the picture, and the owner can do whatever they want with it," as it should be. Seller and author get their cut on the sale, and never again, also as it should be.
Anything else is greedy people trying to cook up greedy schemes in self interest only.
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That's fine as long as "whatever they want it," does not include distributing 200 free copies to other people. Because that would mean each reader only paid an average of 10 cents for the book, i.e., consumers being cheap and greedy.
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That model was great back in the days of physical goods only. It doesn't work in the digital age - you end up with either people copying and redistributing everything and so destroying any commercial distribution model, or you have to use some sort of account or DRM system which renders transferal of any form impossible and destroys the second-hand market. You can pick either extreme, but a middle ground isn't really an option.
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You just broke the quite important doctrine of first sale.
The seller gets paid and gets to say who it's sold to when he makes the sale, and only at that time. After the sale, seller has no say in what happens to/with the product.
Headline is very misleading... (Score:2)
From Amazon "Beginning July 1, 2015, we'll switch from paying Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL) royalties based on qualified borrows, to paying based on the number of pages read."
This only applies to the amazon programs where users do not BUY the book outright. In the way they are doing it, it sort of makes sense. If I have a book available to me as part of Kindle Unlimited, what's the difference if I download it and never read it, or if I never download it at all?
Goose Sauce (Score:3, Interesting)
So, if Amazon isn't going to pay the author until each page is read, does that mean I don't have to pay Amazon unless I read each page?
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So, if Amazon isn't going to pay the author until each page is read, does that mean I don't have to pay Amazon unless I read each page?
I'd have to wonder why you'd subscribe to an ebook lending service if you weren't going to read any of the books, but you could try arguing this with them I suppose.
(Obviously this doesn't apply to ebooks that amazon actually sells, but who needs facts in a slashdot headline or summary).
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I see what you're saying, but people subscribe to the ebook lending service because the lending service has a certain number of books available. Even if you only read six books a year, you probably wouldn't subscribe to an ebook lending service that only had six books available, even if they were the six books you wanted to read. So all those
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No, it's like cable TV where you pay the monthly fee even if you don't turn on the TV.
All subscriber monthly payments go into a big pot and authors get paid proportional to how many pages of their books have been read. But here's the odd thing: all authors make the same amount per page regardless of quality of writing, difficulty of the subject matter or whether it's in a niche market. That's just communistic and greedy of Amazon. Imagine a d
What about the people that convert to epub? (Score:3)
I actually published a book on performance testing on Amazon and have signed up for the KU program. I sell about 5 books per month. Living in the 'first world' I can safely say that the money isn't why I do it. I am still happy to see sales, cause that tells me people read my book. And it would be even more interesting to see if people actually read it. So for me, I'm not worried about missing out on a few dollars and may even get some more feedback.
However, I also buy books in the Kindle store. First thing I do is to convert the books to epubs so I can load them on my Sony Ereader. I am sure I'm not the only one. How does Amazon handle those? Seems to me those are counted as not read even though the buyer actually read them. Just not on a Kindle reader.
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I actually published a book on performance testing on Amazon and have signed up for the KU program. I sell about 5 books per month. Living in the 'first world' I can safely say that the money isn't why I do it. I am still happy to see sales, cause that tells me people read my book. And it would be even more interesting to see if people actually read it. So for me, I'm not worried about missing out on a few dollars and may even get some more feedback.
However, I also buy books in the Kindle store. First thing I do is to convert the books to epubs so I can load them on my Sony Ereader. I am sure I'm not the only one. How does Amazon handle those? Seems to me those are counted as not read even though the buyer actually read them. Just not on a Kindle reader.
The summary is woefully inaccurate as usual. This change only affects titles in KU that are borrowed, and even then only applies to the way that the money already allocated for paying authors in that pool is split up. It used to be per book, and was being abused by submissions of very short titles with no value that were being artificially "read" to increase the payout value. Amazon is switching the model so that actual books are more likely to take the lion's share of the money allocated for that service.
T
For Symmetry (Score:2)
self defeating... (Score:2)
Another reason to not be in Amazon's prime books service.
Coffee table? (Score:2)
Who buys a coffee table book for a kindle?
What The Dickens? (Score:2)
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This looks to me like an incentive to sell your books in serialized weekly installments much as Dickens and Dumas did. The end result is a marathon run --- the 800 page novel --- not a casual summer read.
It would look like that if it had anything to do with sales. As usual for slashdot, the summary and headline aren't actual facts.
This change affects books in the lending library system. Anything on the ebook store is not affected by this change and is paid out the same way it always was.
This change just affects the lending system and is designed to eliminate exactly the problem you are describing - authors intentionally breaking up books into chapters and listing them as 15 separate books instead of one boo
This will improve university/college education (Score:2)
They'd go broke overnight, or very quickly figure out how to make their texts a lot more engaging!
The Other Story: (Score:2)
Not only is this about ripping off authors, but it's about Amazon snooping on what you are doing. How will they know you read a page in an ebook unless they have 24/7 access to what you are reading with your ereader/tablet. Does it stop there? Do they start putting IoT in everything they sell? If I buy a toilet plunger, will it be recording what goes on in the bathroom so Amazon knows when to send me toilet paper & diarrhea meds?
Fuck this shit and fuck Amazon for even suggesting it.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, the book reader software will just store the pages you read (and perhaps how much time you spent on each page) into flash storage. When you connect online, it will upload the data to amazon's servers. I gotta agree with you, fuck this shit. These people need to be forced to stop this and fined tens of millions for privacy violation.
Fraud (Score:2)
Wait what? (Score:2)
This only applies to Kindle Unlimited and Lending (Score:2)
Amazon's planned change to payment of authors does not change the payment for books purchased for a Kindle or a Kindle app. It only affects books that you read using a Kindle Unlimited subscription, or though lending privileges granted to you by a Kindle owner through the Kindle Owners Lending Library program. Those programs pay authors using a model that is not unlike streaming music services: they look at all the books read over the month and divide up the revenue from those programs based on that readers
Re:hey DICE newfags (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't for the life of me figure out why they thought it would be a good idea to make the icons cover up the headline so you can't read it.
Re:hey DICE newfags (Score:4, Insightful)
... or put the action-thing for reading the article above the summary, so if the summary's long you have to scroll back up.
Re: (Score:2)
Completely agreed. And moving the "number of comments" link to the title bar was just batshit, since now you can't just scan down the page seeing what stories are popular.
A bit rough around the edges, but I put together a userstyle to adjust these two things. It looks like this. [imgur.com] Feel free to fix/adapt it:
@-moz-document domain("slashdot.org") {
#firehose article header span.topic {
top: 45px;
}
#firehose article .comment-bubble {
Authors of manuals may become rich .. or maybe not (Score:2)
Authors of manuals may become rich
Although reading reference material in digital format is not that simple (at least for me), that's exactly the kind of book where each page may be read several times.
That really depends on whether the author gets paid every time a purchaser reads a page or just the first time. Typically reference manuals will have a few sections that are relevant to the user, and a lot that are not. If they only get paid the first time a page is read then reference manual authors may not do well.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
My kindle knows when I press the screen to go to the next page. When I connect it to the internet, it will pass this information to amazon. If I never connect it, the author presumably doesn't get paid.
Re: (Score:2)
This change is only for Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners Lending Library. You can't download books through those programs (and therefore can't convert them to other formats); you can only read them on a Kindle or with a Kindle app. (There are surely nefarious ways around that, but it's very different from a standard downloaded Kindle book that can be easily converted to another format.) Books that you buy from the Kindle store are not affected; authors still get paid when somebody buys one of those, w
Re: (Score:2)
You can't write an infinite loop in python its too slow.