Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

annchristy.com

627 pointsmonkeyprojects188 comments

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-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.)

> First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit real hard-working authors who supply a product people want.

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 personally think the whole Kindle Unlimited project is shit anyway and authors shouldn't bother using it. It's like Last.fm, Spotify, Rhapsody, etc. For non-popular artists/authors, it gets their material out there and they get a minimal payout. But compared to a system with legitimate sales, it pays content producers garbage!

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).

Do you realise just how much better a deal 30% is compared to buying a CD from a record store? For any muso who hasn't already sold their soul/rights to a major label (and who's not in Bono's infinitely privileged and connected kind of position), iTunes sales are a fabulous deal.

You're still right though, KU is more comparable to Spotify, where songs are effectively "worthless", but artists consider it worthwhile to give away their music there for discoverability - Zöe Keating used to publish year;y blog posts as raw data as spreadsheets showing how (litte) the variou streaming services (who didn't prohibit her contractually from doing so) paid.

> But compared to a system with legitimate sales, it pays content producers garbage!

I imagine that it depends quite a bit on whether you have marketing in place to promote your work, and your own fan base. That marketing is generally provided by publisher (AFAIK), and isn't free.

I suspect there's a spectrum, and at the low end KU is vastly superior to a traditional publisher for your average author, and at the high end it's vastly inferior. Would you rather have 2,000 x $5.99, or 20,000 x $1.50? Or maybe you did some marketing, so it's 6,000 x $5.99 - $X, where $X is somewhere between $3k and $10k?

Here's one author's breakdown[1], which is interesting reading.

1: http://noorosha.com/kindleunlimited/

> That marketing is generally provided by publisher

Publisher marketing is minimal to none these days. Also, due to cluelessness, the marketing you do get is often not very useful.

I was just at a book marketing seminar yesterday and the speaker mentioned that her publisher did Facebook ads for her...which were known to be ineffective for her genre and demographic, but required by the publisher's guidelines.

So the author had to pick up the slack and take matters into her own hands (and pockets).

> Publisher marketing is minimal to none these days.

Sometimes true, sometimes false -- depends on publisher (and often on internal politics). What they want to push gets money thrown at it, whether or not it's productive: or sometimes extraneous shit happens. (I have a personal example in mind but I do not feel able to write about until after June 2018, at which time I will no longer be with the publisher in question ...)

> Also, due to cluelessness, the marketing you do get is often not very useful.

To some extent this is down to the author. If you actually roll up your sleeves and suggest some affordable and productive targets for marketing spend, the marketing manager in charge of your book will love you to bits because you just made their job a whole lot simpler.

Again: many authors seem content to leave it in the hands of their publisher's marketing department, who are overworked and under constant budgetary pressure. And because they're overworked they don't have time to research/learn new tricks. (I recently saw a proposed marketing plan for a book of mine scheduled for 2018. It was great ... just like the one they ran in 2008, only with a Reddit AmA bolted on top. Yeah, right.)

Hey thanks for the perspective. I've been going through your CMAP series over the past few days...it's incredibly helpful!

Amazon apparently won't care until it affects their bottom line and so far it appears not to.

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.

Ultimately their system depends on reports from end user devices to determine how much a book was read, and that will always be vulnerable to manipulation.

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?

Based on that article having your table of contents at the end of the book is probably trying to scam more pages. Obviously Amazon needs to fix their page accounting system but taking advantage of it in this way is pretty awful and his books should be removed until they are fixed.

For what it's worth, it used to be pretty standard to put the ToC at the back of the book when making epub and mobi files.

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.

I never knew this, thanks for the insight and history behind this approach.

In WJW's case it's based on traditional aesthetics: he writes novels, he doesn't want to omit the ToC completely but he expects readers to want to start with the text itself rather than wading through pages of ToCs.

(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.)

For extra fun: table-of-contents at the end is the convention for French books.

Given that Kindle Unlimited is available in France (according to http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...), I wonder what they do...

I really don't think he was trying to scam 1 more page read in books that probably number at least 300 pages...

It's not about the number of pages—if the ToC was moved to the beginning, the total count would be the same—it's about having people skip to the last page to look at the ToC even if they don't plan to finish the book.

Why would people skip to the last page to look at ToC of a novel? He put it there so people don't have to look at it.

Read the article on how the scam works.

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

It sure sounds like a great way to get people to turn to the way back of the book though too..

As someone with a side project doing formatting ( www.liberwriter.com ) I can confirm that the ToC is supposed to be near the front.

You can downvote all you want, but it's right there in Amazon's guidelines:

https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGui...

"Place the HTML TOC towards the beginning of the book and not at the end of the book. "

> Amazon's anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he'd released them and run a marketing campaign

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.

It's not necessarily cause-and-effect, but it shows how you can get deleted by an algorithm at the worst possible time.

It also shows how if you're submitting your work to an algorithm, following the submission guidelines is a must.

If it was submitted according to the publishing guidelines, then removed, we could have this conversation.

It's really no different than file sharing and the music industry (and how it devalued mp3s and music to $0 over the last decade).

The technology is now just coming around to the book industry.

I don't really see the similarity. With this Kindle scam, the scammers are taking money and directly putting it into their pockets. No one is discovering new content, no one is sharing content, no one is being entertained.

With file sharing, no the sharers make no money (except websites that show ads), and people discover new content that they enjoy.

People may be enjoying new content, at the expense of devaluing the entire industry.

After a decade of music sharing, the next generation grew up just expecting music to be free. This is exactly what many of us were saying and many doing the sharing said it wouldn't happen.

There were even alleged studies that claimed file sharing would increase artist profits. The proof is here and this never happened.

The problem is two-fold: You have amazon devaluing ebooks value through their service and the scammers devaluing it even further.

We are in a transitional period on the Internet, which may eventually give big corporations everything and leave everyone else with the scraps if we continue handing everything over on a silver platter.

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.

> 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.

Maybe it's not so good to have people who read more to vote with other people's money in a capitalistic market.

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.

Maybe it's not, but maybe it is. It's not a foregone conclusion. We've had the subscription model (albeit with many middlemen) in television for a while. It allows for more niche content to survive, which is a benefit, but it can mean that people end up paying for things they don't like.

There are lots of incentives and motives at play in a system like this. For just about every downside there's probably an upside, the question is which outweighs the other (and that may be relative to the person). For example, the person who reads a lot isn't just extracting content for a reduced cost, they are also (possibly) rating a lot of books providing more accurate market info. Their reading, if more eclectic due to volume, may provide more support for more independent authors, allowing for more variety to exist (and be rated). Now, that is a lot of maybes, but marketplaces live off information, so increasing market information is an important task, and this structure may be one way to help with that.

>> end up paying for things they don't like.

That's what's happening now - you've got low quality viewing clubs scamming from everyone else. And that's a certainty. Remember in information one false bit can introduce a lot of havoc.

You've got a lot of maybes - and I'm unconvinced. But I don't work in Amazon.

I do know if I got an unlimited membership I will not be happy my dollars are worth less because I take my time to enjoy my material - pausing and contemplating about it deeply. ( think poems ).

> That's what's happening now - you've got low quality viewing clubs scamming from everyone else.

I'm not referring to that. That's fraud, and it's entirely negative. I'm referring to subsidizing niche content. For example, niche channels[1] and the leeway for more esoteric work to attempt to define a new market. If you believe people always know exactly what they want, then this isn't needed. If you believe people sometimes don't know they like something until they've been exposed to it (and it may not exist without the ability for niche markets to form), then this subsidization of niche content may been a good thing.

Like most things, it's probably somewhere in the middle. Allowing for niche content is how we experiment, but subsidizing too much means that we have a very inefficient market. Put another way, sometimes it may worth it to decrease market efficiency for current options slightly to incentivize the creation of new options in the market.

1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/03/23/471633490/episo...

In an unlimited subscription model you aren't voting with money, you're voting with whatever Amazon decides you're voting with, which is currently the maximum page you reach.

> People who read more are paying less to each author than those who read less

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.

I might be missing something here but if they still track the last page read, then why would it incentivize click-bait titles and synopses?

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.

> I might be missing something here but if they still track the last page read, then why would it incentivize click-bait titles and synopses?

It's much easier to make a book sound epic, insightful and/or wonderful than it is to actually write something like that. It might take a while for the user to give up, but who cares if people only get 50-100 pages into your book before quitting if you can attract multiple times more people?

> Additionally, I think you're first two points mostly address the outliers on the bell curve.

I have personally alternated between those extremes in the last six months. I've read multiple thousands of pages one month, and been too busy to read anything the next. I also suspect there's a population of people that will sign up and forget about it for long periods - just like gym memberships.

> It's much easier to make a book sound epic, insightful and/or wonderful than it is to actually write something like that. It might take a while for the user to give up, but who cares if people only get 50-100 pages into your book before quitting if you can attract multiple times more people?

I don't see how that is any different with a per-user pot than the current system?

The major difference is that it may force the current scam which seems to rely partially on getting people to download and click the last page and partially on a scammer network to do this for each other to move entirely to scamming real people to click the last page.

That said, that's not a good reason in my mind, since we shouldn't be afraid of stopping abuse just because we are afraid it will shift to another area, as it's still progress. I retract that specific example (but I think the others are worth thinking about).

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.

How about a manual review of any anomalously high payouts? Someone who showed up out of nowhere and starts pulling down $70K a month should at least be given a cursory investigation. Based on the description here it wouldn't take five minutes to uncover the problem.

Some of the self-published stuff is so bad it's hard to tell whether it's spam or not. One person's pageturner classic could be another person's spam.

Sure, there's an element of ambiguity here, but those books don't pull down tens of thousands of dollars in "sales" without a whole lot of marketing.

The problem here is the assumption that one account pulls down tens of thousands of dollars. There's nothing keeping the scammers from spreading the ebooks across multiple accounts, and getting $1000 an account across 70 accounts. That's much harder to track by the method suggested due to both the sheer number or accounts and the much smaller payout per account.

I think this is the crux of it. Spam is a lot harder to track than most people realize. Written spam is still a thing in email 30 years later. There's a solution to this but I assume it's a cat and mouse game. To think Amazon just doesn't care about the authors getting scammed is foolish. Without a lot of human involvement this is a very big problem space. One could accuse the program of being poorly thought out but I think that the idea that no one cares about the issue is disingenuous.

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 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.

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.

In other words, the charge is to incentivize people like nateberkopec to do exactly what they did: compress their JPEGs better.

well, except it makes books with screenshots worthless. I bought an e-book on Mac Server. The print book is great because it is full of usefull screenshots showing exactly what you need to do. The Kindle book is a useless collection of smudges. Amazon has taught me to avoid an entire class of technical books on Kindle.

I feel like I've heard a lot of general hate toward the Kindle when it comes to anything with visuals. For starters, it's in black and white, but that's obvious, and nobody's going to try to sell or buy a coffee table photo book on the Kindle.

But the bigger issue with the Kindle platform is the inability to mimic the usefulness of a large, graphics-heavy reference book. It has a tiny screen that isn't good for viewing larger diagrams, and its tools for quickly flipping through pages or jumping back and forth between specific parts of the book are pathetic when compared with using a real book.

In terms of popular digital devices, the Kindle is the most puzzling to me. It was an innovative and groundbreaking technology when it was introduced 8 years ago, and all we've seen since then are the most boring and incremental improvements. Some have even been major missteps, as evidenced by the removal of physical page-turning buttons, only to have them return in the latest model.

Imagine if smartphones, tablets, wearables, or laptops had undergone such a severe lack of innovation in the past 8 years. How the product leadership of the Kindle team isn't fired and replaced with people who have real vision is a complete mystery to me.

I thought Bezos was supposed to be a hard-ass, but from an outsider's perspective it seems like he's totally fine with them barely lifting a finger to collect their paychecks.

You d realize that you can read a kindle ebook on a tablet, phone, laptop, or retina iMac?

You're clearly conflating Kindle (the device) with Kindle (the ebook store).

Can you embed links to the full size image?

You can link out. But one of the things I like about Kindles for reference books is the ability to use it where you are, and not have to have an internet connection in order for it to be useful. Also, Silk isn't that great of a browser.

A bit off-topic, but I couldn't get at all interested in Kindles until the Kindle Fire, because that was the first time it would render O'Reilly books correctly, or render something like a resistor color code correctly. I love having a programmer's reference library in my laptop bag.

Well that explains why Kindle books typically have maps that are so compressed they are completely illegible I guess.

I suppose so. But they're still charging 10x what I pay per MB for my cellphone. I use Ting, which runs on the same Sprint network as Whispernet, and I get 4G.

Amazon Whispernet works in most countries (even down in southern africa) and allows multiple re-downloads of the same book. Most people probably don't download a book ten times, but twice is fairly common for me (multiple readers). Comparing the price with the raw bandwidth price on a single network is not a fair comparison.

> Amazon charges authors $0.15 per megabyte of book file size per download

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/

Using Amazon as a benchmark for bandwidth prices is not a good starting point.

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.

You're right, I have no idea where I got that figure. Editing.

I believe that was the number tossed out (with proof) for hosting services bandwidth prices, in a discussion here about a month ago.

Edit: sortof - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11301085

(Bitterness: found by googling site:ycombinator.com bandwidth price hosting , because that search in-site does not work, because the one that once did was ignored/chased away. Must be some badge of honor like Apple's and Microsoft's app stores - "dismal search, we haz it".)

I guess the per megabyte charge is how they recoup the cost of free 3G on Kindle devices.

I've recently been contemplating getting a new reader. As part of the research I can verify "free" 3G might have been free back in the kindle1.0 years but its $70 now upfront as an additional cost. Also you get to pay extra to have ad blocking.

It's "free" as in "not a monthly charge". The old Kindles had no Wifi-only option, so the price for 3G was already factored into the cost of the device ($399 for 1st generation, $259-359 2nd generation). The 3rd generation was the first to introduce Wifi-only models, and it came in two flavors, a cheaper one with wifi and a more expensive one with wifi and 3G. That's continued throughout the line ever since.

Similarly, the price for ad-free experience was also already factored into the cost of the device, but now is separate for those people who don't mind seeing ads for a lower price (or can't afford the $20).

Market opportunity? =) BSO (Book Size Optimization)

> On AWS, you're charged ~$0.09/GB of bandwidth out. How Amazon thinks 1000x pricing is fair here is beyond me.

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.

My 1st-gen Kindle has the "Whispersync" 3G built-in and it still works fine (which was surprising last time I fired it up).

> On AWS, you're charged ~$0.09/GB of bandwidth out. How Amazon thinks 1000x pricing is fair here is beyond me.

$0.15 per MB is to cover "free" 3G downloads also when roaming.

Just curious. How do you go about advertising your book?

Not at all. It's just a side for me. My sales are 100% thanks to Amazon searches.

Can you share a link to your book?

Sure: http://www.amazon.com/Alone-Across-America-Motorcycling-Back...

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.

Is that really any worse than the dime store pulp novels of old?

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

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.

>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.

> 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.

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.

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.

By "some artists" you mean Vulfpeck's Sleepify album? A stun/statement about the flawed music royalties model, used to fund a free tour?

I don't particularly remember, or particularly care, I just remembered the "hack" such as it is, and how it highlights the inherent flaw I'm talking about in these proxy metrics.

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.

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.

I thought that was the way it worked.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's "Spotify/Netflix for Books" product. $10/month to read any book enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program.

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.".

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

Besides, there's always:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindle_Store#Kindle_Unlimited

http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...

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.

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.

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?

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.

> 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-...

Isn't that reason credit card processing fees?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Would that be user-generated data?

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.

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.

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!

Wow! That's some incredible gross incompetence on part of the people at Amazon who designed this system, and those who QA'd it.

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?

(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.

Uh, store a log file of every user action in that book, and send those log files to the mothership periodically, as internet is available? It does not have to be same day, just eventually.

Analyzing log files for duration/pages visited is probably easier than the equivalent for web server logs, and there are very many services that will analyze those for you.

Yeah, I'm not getting the "This is a very difficult problem to solve" take on this.

The books currently track by location point and you could log on blocks (e.g. every 100 location points progressed).

Amazon's books are already DRM'd to hell, meaning the kindle has to use the unlimited books through the marketplace. Then it's just a matter of reporting user stats, which can be covered in the Unlimited TOS.

You're still trusting the client. Any system that trusts the client is flawed. Time to read per page varies, and if you read the original article it says the scammers are mitigating chances of alerts by clicking through a book over a three day period. You're going to find people who click through at very cost efficient means somewhere in the world when you're making $60,000 a month from this scam.

You would still need to force the users through each page.

Fast-reading bad actor accounts can be flagged as abusers through pattern recognition. Since a subscription is necessary, creating numerous accounts to game the system becomes expensive fast.

This is kind of rough for technical or reference-ish books. Perfectly OK for fiction... well, except for anthologies and collections (HAL 9000 says I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you skip past the other Arthur C Clarke stories in this anthology, you'll have to read all the stories in order, at an acceptably slow speed)

I subscribe to F+SF and it would annoy me if I were technically prevented from skipping the end of stories that don't resonate with me.

Sorry, I meant the abusers would need to force their fraudulent user accounts through each page.

Normal people who don't find a book engaging can still skip the end, just that they'll (justifiably) be worth less to the author.

They don't have to be fast-reading. They can just create a fake log, and send it to the mothership after an appropriate period of time.

Still, I will agree that that will make scammers' lives harder.

Since only paid accounts are used in revenue attribution, faking logs for your own accounts would never work.

Amazon writes the client software (and ships hardware). If the clients communicate securely with the servers, Amazon should be able to trust them.

(I'm excluding Kindle Web Viewer, of course. Perhaps it should not have access to Kindle Unlimited.)

Fucking horrific level of data collection.

Yes, it is, but unfortunately I'm not sure how to get around it in a system where you aren't actually buying the goods, but borrowing them and then they are required to know how much of it you used. Thankfully you can still buy books outright if you don't want to be tracked (sort of. All KU books are Amazon exclusive, so Amazon will at least track that you bought it).

That said, Amazon is already syncing your location,and any annotations you've made[1] so they persist across all kindle devices, so there's already a bunch of tracking in place. Given that there's already some tracking, I wouldn't be too opposed to a per-page bit for whether it was read, triggered when the page has been lingered on for five or more seconds (scaled down to 1 second for partial pages, such as ends of chapters).

1: Anyone remember the big episode years back over Amazon realizing they didn't have the license to a book, then removing it from all Kindle devices automatically, including the annotations made? In what is possibly the most ironic situation I can imagine, the book was 1984.

Speaking of time, why not bill by minutes spent reading instead of pages turned?

I believe this would create a bad incentives structure. You'd penalize the author for people getting hooked to the book (and therefore getting into the 'flow' and reading faster), and encourage scammers to just linger on pages (probably making the scam even easier).

Plus, lots of significant ambiguities to solve: user is reading a page, gets up to do something else, forgets Kindle open. How many minutes do you bill? This might be solvable with the proper signals and rules, but I believe this is far from trivial.

Way more in-depth levels of data collection happen on literally every single page of the web, for reference.

If you're comfortable browsing the internet, this level of reporting on a Kindle seems almost quaint by comparison.

> If you're comfortable browsing the internet, this level of reporting on a Kindle seems almost quaint by comparison.

Yeah, I'm not okay with that other tracking either. In addition, I am paying for my Kindle and my Kindle books or KU subscription. It used to be only free services tracked you, but I guess that limitation is coming to an end.

This. It doesn't even really need to be a log. A bitset with each bit representing a page and a `1` representing "this page read" would do the trick. On a massive 8000 page tomb, that's only 1kb.

If Amazon doesn't need the exact pages read, POPCNT the total and send that.

...that wouldn't change anything. They'd just change the report file to to sync straight 1s... no, you still need obfuscation and encryption, bloating it to at least 100kb.

but thats still pretty minor

I don't think you gain much by forging this number on a single device and you wouldn't be able to manipulate this on ALL devices.

The reason the scam worked is that it encourages all readers to jump to the end of the book (via a link on the first page). I don't think there would be an equivalent way to force people to page through and pause on each page.

That may not make the scam totally impractical to all but the most dedicated hackers, but it does increase the scam costs substantially. Maybe enough to remove the low-hanging-fruit from the scammers and have them target elsewhere.

So, I don't think "that wouldn't change anything".

And you don't think that those logs can be faked? It might stop the casual, "hey fans, read this 'book' to support me" but it wont stop the real scammers or people who would buy reads for revenue and ratings.

Kindles are pretty locked down...it's not that difficult to have the kindle sign the data it sends (probably does that already). Being scammed by hacked kindles is one thing, but they're not even trying here...

You could easily sign the log with the same certificate that is providing the DRM on the book itself. Or a different certificate. Encrypting things is not new, nor hard.

Doesn't work.

You would need to fake the logs for paid accounts, and since rev sharing is a formula of all paid subscriptions, you'd be hard pressed to make positive returns.

Not that any of those are difficult -- and all of the problems you list around connectivity are, uh... it's not like tracking it poorly resolves that problem, they're still finding some way to eventually sync the data up now, it's just lower-quality data.

But... even if those ARE difficult problems, shouldn't you try to solve them BEFORE you launch a business model where you promise people (ie, your authors) that you can do these things? Hell, especially if they're difficult problems, you should fix them before telling people you've solved them.

>(a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode?

I wouldn't let users always in airplane mode participate in the program. Actually, I'm pretty sure they already can't, as they need to connect to get books from KU.

>(b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service?

By using this magic thing called computer storage, and syncing later...

>(c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period?

By observing how much time they spend in each page (with some allowances for different reading speeds, skipping, speed reading etc) and making sure they've legitimately read a good portion of the book.

Even if they haven't actually read it, but only mimicked the above, this constraint just made the fraudsters' process much much slower to complete.

>(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?

You simply require users to update their software to continue participating in KU, and give them a deadline.

Users need to connect to browse/get new books anyway.

>When do you switch your billing script to track purchases like that?

After the deadline, only people with updated KU software will be there, so no problem, you just switch it.

In between, you could always switch it on an account basis (like you already have KU and non-KU account and other tiers) -- those who already updated get the new behavior, etc.

>(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?

It's not like this things are rocket science. Companies do such QA an keep back BS products for a few months all the time. Even companies losing billions from doing so, like Apple. For Amazon, which barely breaks even and lots of offerings are loss leaders that's even easier.

>Product development is hard, and it makes me angry when people handwave it as "gross incompetence" from a position of ignorance.

Hard or not, there are always lots of cases of actual, bona fide, certified, 100% legit, "gross incompetence" too...

Right. There is no easy, tradeoff-free way to automate the tracking and proportional payment process.

Which means that Amazon really does need to move to a more Apple-like human curation process for all new authors, and/or for all new titles. Doing so will immediately tank precious vanity metrics like # of titles added to the store each month. But the alternative is an ever-growing jungle of weeds crowding out the legitimate works. The more that happens, the harder it will be to eventually weed the garden.

I don't see why it needs to be always online. Just locally record the number of pages that were in view for X amount of time.

I'm also assuming that they had to take a bit of a lowest common denominator approach to m2m communication given that they have cell-based (read - costs amazon money) and wifi (does not cost amazon money) enabled versions of the device. If they tracked every page read and sent a log periodically, that _could_ get expensive quickly on the part of the cell-based versions depending on what network agreement they have (numerex, for example, still charges by the kb for this type of low byte traffic). Given that the rules needed to be the same for both types of devices, you couldn't necessarily have an if(wifi){ //send log} else { //send last page syncd} code branch. This is just a giant guess given that I know nothing of amazon's partner network agreements.

I have foobar2000 setup to track my plays for each song. It has an adjustable slider that I have set for 35%. Once 35% of the song has been played it increments the play count. It doesn't even need internet to do this! This stuff isn't that hard.

Spotify does it similarly: 30 seconds == a stream.

> (a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode?

Spotify's solution is to require a device to sync at least once every 30 days or the offline content expires.

> (b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service?

With a log of events that syncs when they do reconnect.

> (c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period?

By measuring the duration spent on each page.

Are you serious ? All of this is fixable in software, in a way that would just penalize revenue from (too) fast readers.

We run a small microsite service for designers and once enabled single page view tracking metrics - we had at the time very few customers and yet manage to smash trough our 50k keen.io event allowance in a single day. Can't imagine it on sonething where books have hundred pages and users running in the million

You can do the aggregation locally on the device. You wouldn't want to send every page view as an immediate event, just send the aggregates every 15 minutes or at the start or end of each session.

That seems like an exceptionally low allowance for any kind of page view tracking. Given that they have the technology in place server-side, and it's not an incredibly hard problem, the server-side costs to Amazon of doing this would be tiny. No comment on the cost of designing a decent algorithm and keeping ahead in the cat and mouse games.

eh it's the cost of using a prepackaged solution. I'd move to an internal one but up until now developing features for the app had more precedence than developing a state of the art event tracking solution.

Yeah, the prices aren't that insane overall tbh. The small size of the free-tier suprised me, but my impression is that free tiers on services have been shrinking since last time I was in that size of company

You don't think amazon can handle a few GB of log files every day for the entire kindle unlimited service? Really? Worst case you do some sampling.

I'm sure they can do, they bill themselves at a different price

It's not even about the billing. Companies 1/1000 the size of Amazon can afford it.

you mean 10 million a year revenue company? I wish we'd be there.

Yep. VC funded startups with 5-10 million in funding can handle GB per day log processing.

It needn't be a tracking event per page.

They're already firing {"current_page":3000}. They just need to start doing something like {"current_page":3000,"pages_seen":5}.

All of these issues were solved over a decade ago by sales contact software.

Kindles could store, locally, the pages that are displayed, and then upload to the server when they have internet connection

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.

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.

Pretty sure that's not true. They sync "furthest page read" not "last page read".

I'm surprised "start read" times and "stopped read time" and "actual pages read" isn't taken into account in the whole process. If an entire 1000+ page book is read within less than 5 minutes, something is wrong. I don't care how fast of a reader you are, my classic Kindle wouldn't be able to process that many pages in under 5 minutes anyway.

Is "incredible gross incompetence" good or bad? I have problems judging people, so need help.

incompetence is bad. gross incompetence is bad on a widespread and surprising scale. incredible gross incompetence is shockingly bad on a widespread and surprising scale.

"Incredible" doesn't mean good, by definition - it means unbelievable.

Why is incompetence bad? I have no ego and don't have a way of judging things like this. I think I am unusual in not having an ego. I can't assert that anything is "bad" or "good", including incompetence. I understand "incredible" here. I also understand "gross", although "surprising" is a bit difficult. I have no ego, so no reference of what is surprising. For those with egos, surprising is usually in reference to the ego.

For example, a tebibyte of RAM is surprising to an OSX programmer. A tebibyte of RAM is not surprising to someone working on seismic simulations for oil extraction.

I do see your point. But I think you are being too pedantic... By saying it's incompetence and "bad", the poster probably meant that the people at Amazon aren't doing a great job (in achieving whatever goals they want to achieve or we customers want them to achieve, in this case keeping the scammers out). Maybe the poster is just frustrated with Amazon not doing its job. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with egos in the sense that the people at Amazon are pathetic idiots that that we should scoff at or that we can indulge in a sense of superiority. It's simply about solving a problem.

Also, I don't think you were fully correct in saying that surprising is usually in reference to the ego. I think it's simply in reference to what you've seen before, what you are used to seeing, what you expect to see or would like to see. It's not necessarily ego-related. But yeah, having an open mind and not being limited by what you've seen is important. But I digress.

Please remove you ego and try again.

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.

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.

Sites down, Google Cache link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

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.

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.

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?

And now watch for a glut of 'Choose your Own Adventure'-style books on KU.

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.

The only thing stopping you from writing a novel was KU?!

No, one of the motivations was thinking it could be easily marketed.

If the book isn't one of these guys 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.

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.

> then he or she won’t get their money for this EIN

What's an EIN?

Wow, Amazon is this cheap?

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.

I'm no great fan of Amazon. I think they manage to spread a veneer of disappointment over everything they brand themselves. The intrusive android video app with mandatory free app store, the progressively worsening courier service, the insane difficulty of finding anything that's actually well-written on Kindle and the crazily annoying ads before the programs on Prime.

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.

> it's the main reason i have never even considered AWS. I'm too conscious to depend on them.

What do you use instead?

Amazon isn't the one perpetrating the scam here....

> 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.

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.

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.

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