Amazon's New Plan to Pay Authors Every Time Someone Turns a Page | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's New Plan to Pay Authors Every Time Someone Turns a Page

theatlantic.com

76 pointssergeant350 comments

This is to address people gaming the old system by turning in 10-30 page books of barely readable garbage. Under that system authors were paid ~$1.30 per book each time the reader passed the minimum 10% book length.

This encouraged a flight to short, low quality books. This new plan should wash out low quality work as it's no longer profitable to publish pamphlets with great titles and near Markov-chain levels of nonsense.

What about something like "Capital in the 21st Century"?

Despite the unfortunate name, that book presents some interesting empirical work. The theoretical side less so. The original "Capital" is nonsense. It's very interesting to me that presenting an incoherent argument, and insisting that anyone who doesn't understand it is ignorant, is a highly successful debating tactic.

>It's very interesting to me that presenting an incoherent argument, and insisting that anyone who doesn't understand it is ignorant, is a highly successful debating tactic.

This is why an awful lot of economics papers use very complex math. It's a way of intimidating critics.

For many of these papers, while the math is usually not exactly wrong, one quick glance at the unrealistic assumptions at the beginning of the paper is enough to invalidate the entire thing.

Since these papers are often used as a pretext to justify economic policy, this is a not unimportant part of how your wages, spending power and wealth is determined.

You prefer Reinhart and Rogoff?

Would this not encourage books to be larger with a lower density of content?

I think they will go for something like ( price_of_the_book)/(no_of_pages) for a single page. So it should not be a problem though.

Historically I think, may be, some of the 19 century books like Charles Dickens The Great Expectation may suffer from the problem you mention. These books used to be published like periodicals like a single chapter would be released each week(like soap). It made sense to lengthen them for financial benefit.

I am not sure, kind of anecdotal, but I think lot of people don't read or finish lot of books.

How about paying by the percentage of what the customer read?

$CLIFFHANGER_CHAPTER_ENDING

That should be adjusting by itself though, since lower density of content lowers the want to continue reading.

Right, but it'll adjust to the point just above the "intolerably sparse" threshold.

It takes way too long for the article to note that this only applies to books enrolled in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, which allows readers unlimited access to opted-in books for $9.99/month.

Books regularly published through KDP are unaffected.

Why is it acceptable for Amazon to be able to record every time someone turns a page?

This only applies to Kindle Unlimited books, aka they're Netflix-like service that loans you books as long as your subscription is active.

It's about as acceptable that Netflix knows exactly what minutes and seconds of any streaming videos I've watched.

Kindle has always synched your last "read to" spot across devices. It's a feature.

Acceptable in what sense? Users know about it and accept it, therefore it must be acceptable. I don't think you can opt out, though.

Sure you can. Don't have our Kindle connected to the Internet while you're reading. Unless I'm missing something?

You'd have to never connect your Kindle to the Internet ever again, when you re-connect it uploads the page position for all your books.

When you read part of an ebook, set it aside, and come back, you want it to remember what page you were on. You also want this to work if you switch between devices. It is technically difficult to make this feature work without letting Amazon also know what page you're on.

It is technically dift to make this feature work without letting Amazon also know what page you're on.

Not since encryption has been invented. Firefox syncs currently open tabs and other stuff without letting Mozilla know about them.

Encryption is a waste of complexity and battery life here.

Firefox encrypts your history and open tabs because those are sensitive.

A page number in a book is not.

But they don't only sync page numbers, but also written annotations (and bookmarks and highlights).

And regarding battery life, even a CPU much weaker than the one used by the original Kindle can encrypt at 1MB/s, so encrypting a couple of KB is absolutely negligible.

A detailed history of what pages of what books I'm reading and when is certainly as sensitive as browser history, if not moreso.

In terms of data collection, I think this one is actually pretty harmless.

Because it's the device they're offering, the version of the content they're offering, and the service they're offering.

If you disagree with this practice, you're free to not accept the offer. It's as simple as that.

Just because people are free to refuse it doesn't mean we must find it acceptable and refrain from criticizing it.

Of course you're free to criticize it, but declaring it "acceptable" or "unacceptable" without justification isn't particularly helpful.

If you disagree with this practice, you're free to choose from one the competitors which engage in the same collection activities.

It doesn't make it acceptable.

No, it is acceptable.

See? Random people declaring something acceptable or unacceptable without justification isn't particularly helpful. If you want to explain why you find it unacceptable, that might actually be interesting to someone.

I don't mind Amazon knowing how far into a book I've read, if it allows them to better compensate the authors of quality books and helps them penalize the authors gaming the system. However, if you want to keep your reading habits private, I can sympathize with that. An opt-in/opt-out option might be a good compromise in this case.

By your logic drug, arms and organ trade also become acceptable.

As for Amazon, don't you think it is enough to make first, say, 10% pages free? If other 90% is junk then there are reviews for that.

I wish they would at least share that data with me. For example I always read before going to sleep, so with that data I could track my sleep habits.

Agreed. I'm much, much more amenable to data collection when I can use that data myself however I want.

They already know what books you're reading (because most of them have been purchased through amazon), and you're worried about them knowing what page you're on?

I am worried that an action as unimportant, intimate and personal as the turn of a page in a book, which previously required no expenditure of mental energy whatever, suddenly becomes an action with potentially global consequences. A passive action - reading something - becomes an active action (causing money to be sent to the author). I feel this is a fundamental change in the nature of the interaction.

They also record the amount of time spent on each page and use that to predict the total reading time remaining.

Privacy issues aside, there are a number of really amazing tools Amazon could provide authors/editors/publishers if they were willing to share this data with them. The ability to pinpoint where readers either skip ahead or pick up the pace would offer editors a remarkable glimpse inside how readers approach a given story. It'd be even more useful if those insights could then be applied to help with editing unpublished manuscripts in the future. Compared to the present, where editors are forced to make what are often judgment calls on plotting, having hard data to look at would be a remarkable benefit.

This really buries the lede! Only two mentions that this only applies to Kindle Unlimited, and not until the seventh paragraph.

Well under the new rules the author is paid by paragraph read, not for the whole article.

The author is paid for pageviews, not quality.

This could offer the final blow to the paper book market:

Since they way to monetize ebooks will be totally different than paper books, this means they'll need to be written in a totally different way.

So this means most authors will choose one or the other, and most likely they'll choose to write only ebooks, because there's more money there.

Is that true though, that ebooks revenues are higher than printed books? Or maybe the aggregate of the author's cut of revenues is higher for ebooks?

I am skeptical, but am willing to be proven wrong.

You really think Amazon paying per page turned for Kindle Unlimited is "the final blow to the paper book market"?

I currently publish several books of a legal nature on Amazon, both in print and ebooks. I'd say my print book sales to ebook sales are 10:1 ratio in favor of print books.

That is interesting. When I read technical manuals I prefer them in print, when I read for pleasure (lately) I have been reading digital. I am not sure if this is conditioning from college or something else, but my experience is in line with your comment.

If we are talking about Kindle - digital reading here - how does a "page"/ "page flip" be defined with varying factors like -

X devices a kindle app can be consumed on: A page can be of different word length on a mobile than of a tablet?!

X What if I bump up the font size to max on my device? Could it still count as a single page flip, if I flip the page?

==> Well the above is answered by Amazon with "Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC)" @ https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN

-> Academic textbooks/ reference books/tech. books etc are not page turners. Are the authors of this kind at a disadvantage with the new model?

I think the per page strategy is way too arbitrary. What is a page exactly? A unit of measurement of text? How big is a page? What font must you use. What about technical books and books with pictures and diagrams? If we invented modern electronics before books we wouldn't care about pages. Measuring time spent would be a lot more useful and harder to game. What if the book is dense with so much good information that I feel the need to read slower or reread a paragraph?

The pages will almost certainly be based on word count. I believe the standard is 150 words/page.

Word count is probably the best measure to base this on, because time spent reading is totally arbitrary and depends on external variables, like how fast a reader the buyer is, how distracted they are while reading, and how difficult the text is. Personally, I'd think it makes more sense to pay us per 1000 words of text read, but if they want to call 250 words of text a page, that essentially accomplishes the same thing.

Technically this is probably based on Kindle's location measurement, rather than physical pages. Locations allow them to sync where you are across vastly different devices without worrying about the fact that one may be a mobile with a huge font size showing three words a page, and the other might be a desktop reader with a tiny font.

Did you not read the article? It says there is a standard font size etc, etc

"Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC)" @ https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN

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