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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.
Come on now!!!! The link in the post is broken. That's just sloppy.
Did anyone even look at the post before putting it up?
Is the prorated cost of the unread pages refunded to the customer?
It's sad really. The promise of the web was that would be a tool for democratization, it would empower the individual, level the playing field. It was finally a chance for the individual to stake out a piece of ground and speak dirrectly to his or her audience. 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. So far this has been true in photography, music, and books. Probably more.
Well your honor, not only did the defendant purchase "How to murder your spouse", he read the page on poison techniques 37 times and only read the rest of the book twice. Since the autopsy indicates death by poison as described by the page in question, I rest my case.
Fat, impressive coffee table books are...
...not e-books.
Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in.
Why? Why wouldn't they have just as much control over the price-per-page as they currently do* over the price-per-book?
*which may not be much, or may be a lot. I don't know.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Additionally importantly, some books are simply worth more than others, even in low-volume batches, especially if the books are necessities to those buying them. That's part why textbooks are so expensive, and part why Patricia Cornwell is sold in grocery stores and is perpetually 20% off the cover price. If mass-market paperbacks and even new hardcover books were too much more expensive they probably just wouldn't sell.
I assume that a lot of e-books are the same way, and honestly, they're not priced well, and too many middle-men get in the way. e-books should be the author selling right to me. Call it the exact opposite of the music distribution model; author owns the work and potentially contracts-out editing and marketing, and retains all profit after costs are paid or shares profits as a percentage with editors and marketing depending on the arrangement that they come to.
That Amazon is involved as a middleman is itself a problem. There's no need for the author to sell to Amazon for them to then sell to me when there's no physical medium for e-books, and for traditional publishing, Amazon should just be another traditional retailer, not something special.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I mostly agree, though it generally feels safer to hand your CC details over to a reputable vendor like amazon than some anonymous author selling a book on the internet using who knows what means to store your personal information. And who knows if Joe Author is storing your payment details securely or not. Or whether it is just some author's nephew who knows how to install some web script on shared hosting.
Sure you can call the CC company and get the payment reversed, but it is more hassle than not having to do it.
So, if Amazon isn't going to pay the author until each page is read, does that mean I don't have to pay Amazon unless I read each page?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The 'purchaser' doesn't pay less, but the writer gets paid less because Amazon just wants to pay them less.
That's it right there. If the reader turns the pages and you end up getting more at the end of the book, then I can work with that. But that's not what's happening. If someone buys your book and doesn't read it, you get squat but Amazon still gets paid.
It's kind of a ripoff for authors.
What the OP doesn't mention is that there's a kind of "scam" on Amazon where people self-publish e-books on a broad variety of topics and give them promising descriptions. The books are usually somewhat short and/or heavily plagiarized, but the key is that the entity doing the self-publishing shotguns tons of them out there. Some even use automated systems to simplify the process...it's on that scale. They're all crap, mind you, but they're cheap, so a lot of people say "what the hell...how bad can it be?" and buy them. Five bucks here, five bucks there, and the books turn out to be worthless, so the people who buy them rarely read more than a few pages in. This is a means of changing the economics so that if you are a self-publisher and your book is total shit, you won't get paid.
A valid question would be, "What does Amazon care?" The issue is twofold: one, the Kindle users have a bad experience, which is bad for Amazon, and two, the crap books clog up the search results. Both of these are against Amazon's (and our) interests. Hence the desire to figure out a way to cull such things. And I like that Amazon's effectively taking themselves out of the decision loop on this...ultimately, it's a way that the readers get to decide, directly, whether or not the person who published the e-book should get their money.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.