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Amazon Is Only Going To Pay Authors When Each Page Is Read
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has a new plan to keep self-published authors honest: they're only going to pay them when someone actually reads a page. Peter Wayner at the Atlantic explores how this is going to change the lives of the authors — and the readers. Fat, impressive coffee table books are out if no one reads them. Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in.
How this is good for anyone but Amazon. Because I don't want EVERY book to be written as a page turner. Just as I don't want every book written from the same POV, or with the same set of characters. Doing things that could encourage a particular writing style isn't to my benefit as a reader.
I can't for the life of me figure out why they thought it would be a good idea to make the icons cover up the headline so you can't read it.
Do the readers only pay for each page when they look long enough at it to be able to actually read it?
... or put the action-thing for reading the article above the summary, so if the summary's long you have to scroll back up.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
In a message recently released to investors, Amazon has announced that its plans to improve targeted advertising will now utilize metrics gleaned from analyzing what eBook pages it's locked in market monkeys (IE The people who think that they are the customers) read, as well as how long they linger over each particular page. This will allow Amazon sell more highly targeted advertisements to its actual customers and thus tap a previously unavailable segment of analytics.
For example, the monkey reads a book that contains both an explicit sex scene and a restaurant scene. By timing how long the monkey takes to read each scene (and hopefully in the future each paragraph - along with eye movement measurements) Amazon will be able determine what sort of sex the monkey prefers as well as the types of food they like. Correlating this data with data obtained from other books the monkey has read, Amazon will be able to craft an individual marketing scheme that highlights the monkey's desire for blindfolds as well as chocolate lava cake.
Note that Amazon has been rumored to be in talks with Facebook about posting such campaigns to not only the monkey's FB feed, but also to the feed of their friends as well. This will have a synergistic sales effect of either the monkey's friends sharing the same taste (and thus opening up new markets), or the monkey paying to opt out of the campaign (in order to hide their behavior) - and thus bringing in more revenue . Amazon has already applied for a patent on paying to opt out of a marketing campaign and they have also started trialing the technology in some market segments in order to estimate how much value monkey's place on their privacy.
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"It turns out, however, that we all just handed the power over to different middlemen who now use more sophisticated tools to squeeze the artist back to a position of bare survival."
As it came to a surprise.
This has been, more or less, a capitalist market (quite so, since it was a novelty). Even Adam Smith knew that leaving capitalism alone, it is the land owners the ones that extract the most rent, with farmers being left at the point of bare survival. Here the public is the land the author nurtures via her books -and the public nowadays is owned by Amazon. The more free market tools are thrown to me mixture, the more certain this kind of output is to be.
This system would allow everyday people to sell used ebooks at whatever the market would bear. The downside is in a system like this, reading habits are traceable by all. However, if you wanted to buy "IEDs for terrorist Dummies" you probably wouldn't want to use this system.
Silence is a state of mime.
> The only downside
To me as a reader the bigger downside seems to be that my behavior is tracked, monitored and logged.
Another profiling shitshow that logs what you read, when you read, how long you read, which sections you skip, which you pay more attention to, etc.