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Kindle Unlimited Scammers Gaming the System At the Expense of Real Authors (annchristy.com) 106

Posted by msmash from the gaming-the-system dept.
Reader saccade writes: Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's book service that lets customers "check out" any book from a large selection without paying for individual titles. Like most things on the Internet, it's fallen prey to scammers. The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read. However, scammers have figured out how to rig the system by posting large, fake books, then hiring click farms to "read" them. This doesn't affect people using the service to read books (other than the nuisance of occasionally stumbling over bogus titles), but legitimate authors are getting squeezed as more of the KU payment pool goes to thieves and their bogus books.
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Kindle Unlimited Scammers Gaming the System At the Expense of Real Authors More

Kindle Unlimited Scammers Gaming the System At the Expense of Real Authors

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  • That's capitalist way!
    • Actually, this is more akin to the socialist way, where some central authority collects all the money and is charge of distributing it in a "fair" way. But does a really bad job at it.

      The capitalist way would be for each author to sell their own work and collect money directly from the buyer, which is how the regular Amazon Kindle market works (except for the publishers monopolizing authors and trying to rig prices).

  • split fee at user level (Score:4, Interesting)

    by xlyz ( 695304 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @10:37AM (#51940513) Journal

    don't share money from a common pool, but split each user fee based on his readings. spammers will still get some money, but only from people that actually read their books: not so many I would say.

    • Agreed. (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The click-farm pays only because the limit of money that can be farmed is higher than the amount each farm-account must pay to buy in to the service. Increase the granularity of tracking and pay distribution, and this problem is solved.

      Unfortunately, that increases complexity and overhead costs of implementation. It may be cheaper to work on ways of automatically detecting click farms and banning those accounts.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They also mention that they are depublishing their book before it can be reported. Another easy solution is to delay royalty payments for 90 days and require the book to stay published for the entire duration just like they do with "stock vesting". If you or amazon pulls the book or it has too many complaints, etc... then you don't get the commission.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Sneftel ( 15416 )

      Moreover, only split actually-paid fees (not trial accounts), and only after Amazon takes its cut. That way, there'd be no way for an independent cartel of publishers and readers to collude in a way that let them come out ahead.

      That doesn't solve one of the problems the article mentioned -- driving up popularity and visibility, so that real readers end up buying fake books -- but that's a problem Amazon is already dealing with.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I like the idea, but a downside would be to disincentive less popular authors.

      I'm assuming more people will sign up to read popular books, so they in can be considered getting a cut from the general pool.

      Then, each less popular author would be getting a cut from a percentage of the general pool. It could balance out if each less popular author gets a generally fair cut divided from the general pool.

      But I'm going to assume a large readership of the general pool will not read any non-popular books. And that

  • >> The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read

    Seriously? I guess I'll have to start writing wordier and larger then.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )

      >> The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read Seriously? I guess I'll have to start writing wordier and larger then.

      Funny enough it was done this way to prevent this exact type of fraud. In this case, they wanted to prevent authors from uploading crap then incentivising people to download it. Or even legit authors from using social media and such to get people to download their book knowing they wouldn't read it, just to "support" the author. Guess they didn't see this one coming though.

    • Should be that each individual's subscription money goes proportionally to the authors they read. One page farmer could only cause as much damage as the money he is putting in (minus Amazon profits, of course). Seems like a simple page limit or similar could nip this in the bud.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Kreela ( 1770584 )
        A month or two ago Amazon put in a cap of 3000 pages per book that they will pay for books in the programme. That gives you an idea of what was going on, and that they already knew about it. People were bundling together several books and getting click-farmers to "read" them. Now the fraudsters are forced to publish more books in order to get the same payout, so the problem has become much, much more visible. That's what's got a lot of regular authors up in arms - the new books that are stuffed with nonsen

    • >> The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read

      Seriously? I guess I'll have to start writing wordier and larger then.

      I have been told that is how American educational books are already paid. Which explains why they are always 10x longer and has smaller topics than equivalent local books.

  • What's the problem? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    These books are identified, the authors that claimed them via KDP are known legal entities (KDP authors have to enter USA SSNs - even when resident elsewhere). With this information Amazon merely needs to forward it on to the FBI's cyber-crime dept who will gladly prosecute the fraud cases. The money comes back, assets taken by the feds, etc, and details passed on to crook's native police.

  • Isn't this the same way IBM's LOC payment system worked?
  • they've not actually stolen anything have they? they've created a new work of art, that just happens to be junk.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes they have.
      They're taking money from a shared pool based on fraudulent "readers"

    • they've created a new work of art

      That's why they are called con artists. This problem is very wide spread due to all management courses telling you should steer the processes on measurable objectives. The real objectives (how often a book is read in this case) are near impossible to check, but there is always something you can check (the number of url hits, for example). So the wrong quantity is optimized and you literally get what you ask for: url hits, not book readings.

      I have worked in a company where we had to maximize the support time

      • I just found out I'm going to be judged partly on the number of commits to the repository I make. Guess whether I'm changing how I work to generate more or fewer commits. (Surprised me; the company is usually smarter than that.)

  • You can't trust anything on the Internet anymore. If you go to a review website hoping to find legitimate reviews by real customers for a product, service, or company; be prepared to encounter hundreds of "phony reviews" that are posted by paid shills to write glowing reviews for crappy products. People are paid to hype things on social media and programmers are busy creating bots to automate stuff like that too. You might see two comments on a forum; one has hundreds of "likes" and the other has none; but

    • Re:Another example of rigging the system (Score:5, Insightful)

      by swb ( 14022 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @10:56AM (#51940687)

      I'm curious whether people naturally game the system because people are inherently greedy and dishonest, or whether they're greedy and dishonest because the system itself appears rigged and gamed from the top down and they're only adapting to a broken system.

      • Re:Another example of rigging the system (Score:5, Insightful)

        by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @11:02AM (#51940751) Journal

        The former. Witness the number of people on here and elsewhere who will give every excuse imaginable why they don't pay the people for the work they've produced but instead pirate it because it's free.

        They're greedy because they believe they are entitled to everything for free and dishonest because they make excuses for why they shouldn't pay someone for the work which has been produced.

        • Re:Another example of rigging the system (Score:5, Insightful)

          by d34thm0nk3y ( 653414 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @12:23PM (#51941543)
          Retroactive copyright extensions that actually do steal content from the public domain: Totally not a game rigged from the top down, apparently.

          • Retroactive copyright extensions that actually do steal content from the public domain: Totally not a game rigged from the top down, apparently.

            I absolutely concur with you about the ridiculous laws that have created ex post facto copyright extensions. I'm a big fan of the original copyright terms of 1790, and everything that's more than a few decades old should be in the public domain.

            HOWEVER, that has little to do with GP's point. Go on any torrent site and witness the number of people who are currently downloading movies, music, tv shows, books, etc. from this year. Do the same for material of the past decade (or even 28 years, if you prefe

          • I remember briefly reading about jazz bands suffering a lot. Live bands face huge competition from dead people.
            Of course that is the case whether said dead people are in public domain or not.

            • Classic rock cover bands have that issue also, in order to play the venue has to have a license and they have to apply to all the various copyright holders. Where I live there are no cover bands because the local bar owners are back stabbers that report each other every time a band plays even if it's not a cover band and no covers where played and no copyrights violated.

              • Why can't a cover band in such an ASCAP desert buy its own portable license from the major performance rights organizations that covers any venue of a given size class that the band performs in?

                • I don't know about ASCAP but BMI has a large amount of popular music and doesn't allow the band to license, they claim it's the venues responsibility. I've never played covers or if I did it was while in college and they took care of it.

                  My brother is on an indie label and doesn't play covers, one of the bars is a decent size venue and is located near the highway and a hotel the local indies bring in a lot of touring indies and other signed artists to play there. This draws a crowd from in and out of town an

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by swb ( 14022 )

          Now the next question, do we perceive people as greedy and dishonest because they actually are, or because the level of greed and dishonesty is so high we simply assume everyone has this quality?

        • They're greedy because they believe they are entitled to everything for free and dishonest because they make excuses for why they shouldn't pay someone for the work which has been produced.

          That's an interesting assertion. Now please tell me a method of actually paying the artist for the stuff they provide. By all accounts if I buy their CD the money goes to a record exec who produces nothing and locked the content creator into a contract with a healthy amount of debt. Healthy for the record execs to have an excuse not to ever give them money that is.

          Now go ahead and tell everyone how I fell right into your trap and proved how greedy I am.

          • Two tips:

            1. Choose a band that writes its own songs. Such a band collects "publishing" royalties on the musical work in addition to royalties on the sound recording.
            2. Choose a band that isn't signed to a major record label, one that still owns its own recordings. Such a band collects a larger share of royalties on the sound recording, even if it does pay a distributor such as CD Baby.

        • Downloading is ethical not because it is free to the user, but because it is free to humanity - you create wealth as you copy, you don't take it from anybody.
          Yes, there is still the need to fund the initial creation, something the majors are notably inefficient at - that's why we have Patreon and Tippee and Kickstarter and such.
          Yes, crowdfunding creation is nowhere in scale yet in par with creation funding needs, but that's mostly because the MAFIAA has spent tons of money these last years trying to preve

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Rande ( 255599 )

          Or because I live in the wrong country and won't sell to me at any price short of negotiated license for the entire country.

          Well, technically, I could fly to that country, buy the hardcopy media, and then fly back, but that seems a little OTT.

      • #1 people have been gaming the system for decades. SSI, disability, public pensions, etc.

      • Re:Another example of rigging the system (Score:5, Interesting)

        by T.E.D. ( 34228 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @03:21PM (#51942747)

        I'm curious whether people naturally game the system because people are inherently greedy and dishonest...

        Its this, sad to say. To misquote Kay from MiB: a person is nice, but people are greedy dishonest animals.

        Let me illustrate with a (somewhat personal) story from the early 20th Century.

        The Osage Nation in Oklahoma did one thing really smart (and lucky) that most other tribes didn't manage: When the federal government forced (yes forced) them to distribute their land to individual tribe members, they kept the mineral rights for the tribe. Then, in 1898, oil was found on their land.

        Picture Beverly Hillbillies on a tribal scale. For a while, the regular checks from the oil revenues were not just enough to live off of, but enough to qualify recipients as fairly wealthy. By the 1920's they were like a rural Oklahoma version of Kuwait.

        So in come the greedy a-holes. At first they satisfied themselves with declaring Indians "incompetent", and using the government guardianship to steal their money. But what they eventually started doing is finding themselves uneducated older Osages, tricking them into "adopting" them, and then killing them. [wikipedia.org] At least 60 Osages were murdered in the first half of the 1920's.

        The FBI was called in, but what finally stopped the carnage was when a law was passed that prevented anyone without provable Osage "blood" from inheriting an oil headright. Eventually the money tapered down to not enough to live on by itself, but the laws remain.

        And this is why I, as an adoptee raised in an Osage family, don't get to call myself Osage. I'm not on the rolls with my Father and his people, because once upon a time money was involved, and people in general are sociopathic assholes.

    • any algorithm can be gamed i get free rides on NYC public transportation enough times to make it worth it because i figured out which car to ride in

    • Even if you take out all the shill 5 star reviews, you still have a shit load of 1 star reviews by people who are pissed off for stupid reasons like not reading the product description or some other random reason. Look at the reviews for Fallout 4 on Amazon and filter down to the 1 star reviews. Most people are pissed off that the disk doesn't have the full game, just an installer for Steam and then you are expected to download the game from there. If you read the description and the answered questions it m

      • Amazon's website review system is quite irritating in general. One of the most annoying things they do is group multiple reviews for items with the same brand and category but different implementation or outright functionality together. It leaves you sorting through piles of completely irrelevant reviews if you even want to read them.

  • Never understood why they do it that way... (Score:3)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @10:57AM (#51940703) Homepage

    Never understood why they do it like SUM(pages read)/users instead of SUM(pages read/user). That way a bot reading 10000 pages doesn't matter, it'll still only distribute it's own subscription fee. Granted, it'd be a lot harder to audit since rates would differ slightly but surely you can have some independent audit verify that you're not skimming extra off the royalty pool.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      The real story to me is why anyone would buy a device that reports to some central database how many pages of which books they have read.

  • Yet another example of why we can't have nice things.

  • How to distinguish a garbage book generated to game the payment system from an unreadable book written by some earnest, but delusional and untalented author? And from those and, say, Finnegan's Wake?

    riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

    Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by neminem ( 561346 )

      Wow, that's actually from Finnegan's Wake? I kind of want to make one of those joke quiz sites now, where the quiz is: is this from Finnegan's Wake, or from spam I received in the past month? Cause I apparently can't tell the difference.

      • It's the first two paragraphs. I once used an emacs that had a command you could run, transmogrify text, that would temporarily turn your text into stream of consciousness style prose in the style of Finnegan's Wake.

  • Seems like Amazon could simply analyze which books are generating revenue and pay authors of those books.

  • The 'pool of money' thing is a nasty bit of business anyway - it's horribly unfair to authors for Amazon to be deciding how much the lot of them will get to split, then effectively make them fight over it.

    This scam would only hurt Amazon (and thus give them an incentive to fix it fast) if it weren't for the pool of money concept. As it is, they don't have to do anything until enough real authors bail out that there's nothing good to read.

  • This is a design failure, not an implementation failure. Buy a book, get a book. Nothing wrong with that paradigm. More and more vendors want to grind content down to finer and finer granules, as it ends up increasing their profit.

  • Have a fee to be listed on the unlimited program. Let anyone buy a book uploaded but if the author wants the book included in the unlimited package... require an additional fee which goes to have someone actually check the book out to make sure it isn't bullshit.

    And then have metrics in place where in the money from the unlimited program are held for a trial period if the author is unknown. If unusual metrics pop up... such as huge sales... possibly investigate again more closely. The money shouldn't be del

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