Notorious Kindle Unlimited abuser has been booted from the bookstore | Hacker News Reader

Notorious Kindle Unlimited abuser has been booted from the bookstore

techcrunch.com

86 pointssaxatrumpet31 comments

How much would it cost Amazon to assess the value of each book uploaded to Kindle? Some AI process could be trained on "real" vs "scam" books and attach a score, then humans could review the worst scores and then maybe investigate the authors who post a majority of bad books.

Even after the fact, once a book is generating profits in the Kindle store, one can think of many automated controls:

1. It shouldn't matter that the old Kindles can't tell the pages you've read (just the max page you reached), if the new ones can, because then, based on the data from the newer Kindles, one can detect books where people only read the first and last page (and then maybe investigate those books manually)

2. Even if no Kindle device was able to tell the pages you've read, if it's possible to measure the speed at which a reader reached the last page (date book first opened - date last page read), then by comparing to similar books of similar size it should not be difficult to identify outliers

3. Etc.

My point is, for some reason Amazon doesn't want to police itself, neither in the Kindle store nor in the general store (third-party sellers), which is bad for its brand.

This is puzzling because it's irrational, and one would think Jeff Bezos is more of the hyper-rational type...

So a piece of the puzzle is missing, but I can't see it.

I was thinking the same, there are known automated strategies to catch copy cats or just bad writing.

However I’m guessing having a big inventory is more valuable than quality. That could be amazon’s cultural motivation to dismiss quality by default

The scam books are not just "bad writing" and usually don't rip off other works; many of them are filled with pure garbage: random letters that form non-words.

But maybe you're right, the size of the inventory is what matters to Amazon who may be stuck in a "growth at all costs" mentality. That would explain it in part.

That should make it even easier. If X number of words don’t appear in a dictionary, then it’s a scam. Amazon also has a natural language processing platform. If it can’t parse X percentage of sentences, it’s a scam.

This would catch books that are bad on purpose, which is itself a kind of art. Though maybe it can be easily solved by triggerring a manual review once you have 100 of them uplaoded?

One explanation could be that he has simply not gotten around to thinking about the problem yet.

Or he's fallen into the trap that popularity (and popularity=revenue) is an adequate signal for quality, if third-party sellers are bringing in adequate sales loads then there's nothing to fix.

Amazon doesn't really care. This is simply one kindle unlimited author stealing from the others.

Until this style of scam steals a big perportion of revenue, enough that real authors stop uploading new books, Amazon has no incentive to do anything about it.

> How much would it cost Amazon to assess the value of each book uploaded to Kindle? Some AI process could be trained on "real" vs "scam" books and attach a score, then humans could review the worst scores and then maybe investigate the authors who post a majority of bad books.

or someone could just read them.

The sucky thing about this is that the way Amazon pays out Kindle Unlimited reads is through a pool they create each month. They essentially take the size of the pool (say, $20 million) and divide by the total pages read and pay out to each author depending on how many page reads they had.

In other words, scammers like this are taking money directly from authors producing legitimate work.

Love the totally genuine comment there from "Diamond Girl" too...

> No real content??? As if. I LOVE Chance’s books, they’re amazing!!! LOL to theFivierrr idea, his books are proper legit. You write slander or libel or whatever it’s called. You should be ashamed of your bad journalism, ever fact checked anything?!

I'm pretty sure that is the author.

Pretty sure the author bought some reviews on Fiverr as well.

Either them or someone with a _very_ dry sense of humour, yeah.

If you have an insufficiently moderated platform where users can upload content, and you offer money to content uploaders based on some measurement, you will get largely crap, but optimized for that measurement.

Any bets on if the drawing for the jewelery ever happened? That could lead to actual criminal prosecution I think if he wasn't very careful with the wording.

There's those multiple-choice adventure books where you have to either go to page 43 or 26 depending on how you want to continue the story. That might be a legitimate way to abuse the system and give the jewellery to your SO :)

> Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page.

Seems an obvious thing that would have been taken advantage of. Is there a rational behind why they didn't want to track something like time per page or time spent within one book? People don't like tracking I guess but statistics like those can be interesting to readers as well.

YouTube does this. A "view" is only registered if the viewer has seen a certain minimum amount of the video.

> Is there a rational behind why they didn't want to track something like time per page or time spent within one book?

The page-tracking feature that's used by KDP was originally only designed to allow users to sync their reading progress across devices. It was never intended for this application.

Smart stuff from the guy who worked out the scam, though.

He's not wrong, he's just an asshole.

Not to mention that some people were using this scheme to launder money, though typically with sky high book prices.

Lol. The comments section in the article is pretty heated.

I'm sorry for the out-of-topic rant:

I got the "we care about your prinvacy" note, in spanish.

What do I have to do to convince the internet that I don't speak fucking spanish? Yes my ip is in spain because I live here.

Is it really so hard for developers in 2018 to realize that IP does not mean language preference?

<edit> And also, stop spoiling spaniards with providing everything translated, this country needs to learn some english

¿Por qué no aprendes inglés?

Latin american here,

I like to read things in Spanish.

pd: give you a break, go to a walk, talk to nice people.

> I like to read things in Spanish.

Cool but kind of irrelevant here. The point is that the website is ignoring the preferred locale requested by the browser and relying on IP geolocation for language. It can be infuriating for persons who do not understand the particular language, and cannot read the content even when they have specified their preference clearly.

My point is that is entitlement.

I browse the site and it defaults to English, and my browser is set to en_US as locale.

Yes but if you were in the US and your locale was es_US, wouldn't it be frustrating if a website that offered Spanish gave you English by default simply because they were not utilizing locale correctly?

How is it entitlement?

This is an american company, so default language is in english. Which I went to the trouble of learning in order to "join the rest of the world", out of my tiny homecountry.

They have their content available in spanish as well, which is great, but I don't speak it (I do actually but I am so sick of it being forced on me)

All I want is the courtesy of letting me choose the language that I want them to talk to me with.

Imagine if someone irl would only speak to you in spanish cause you're latino-looking

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