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Amazon Is Only Going To Pay Authors When Each Page Is Read

Posted by Soulskill on from the more-lucrative-ways-to-slice-up-the-pie dept.

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.

43 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Tell me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Tell me... by TWX · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.
    2. Re: Tell me... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I agree but at the same time disagree - Amazon exists as a one-stop e-book shop and makes discoverability of similar authors/books etc. easier as well as managing the monies and distribution. Independent authors that are successful seem to do pretty well under the current model and therefore value is added. The new model is likely to destroy value - particularly for books being dipped in and out of.

    3. Re: Tell me... by Stewie241 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Tell me... by art123 · · Score: 5, Informative

      This only applies to books read through the Kindle lending program where the author's all receive a part of the monthly pooled money based on the lending behavior. It is true of course that a 200 page book can provide as much value as a 500 page book to a particular reader. But let's assume that the author's effort is more for the 500 pages versus 200 pages (not always the case but probably true much of the time). This seems like a fairer way of distributing the Kindle lending money to me. I don't know anything about the lending program but hopefully authors have control over whether they participate or not.

    5. Re:Tell me... by Nate+the+greatest · · Score: 4, Informative

      Given that the new terms are voluntary and limited to just KU, this will likely be fine for everyone. What the above summary missed was that the new payment terms only apply to the books authors put into Kindle unlimited, and not to the entire Kindle Store. http://the-digital-reader.com/... Amazon made the change to encourage authors to submit longer works to KU. The old terms were based on per ebook read, not page. That favored short works over longer works.

    6. Re:Tell me... by I'm+just+joshin · · Score: 2

      Mod Parent Up.

      This has to do with ebooks in a particular program where many authors were abusing the system.

      This is a good thing.

    7. Re:Tell me... by hey! · · Score: 2

      Well, this applies to self-published books read through their Kindle Unlimited Program.

      I agree with your sentiment, but having read a number of self-published books, it wouldn't be fair to the better self-published authors to pay them the same rate per free book download as the worst ones. While some self-published stuff is as good as most traditionally published fiction (albeit usually needing a bit more proof reading), there's a vast body of stuff that consists of unreadable manuscripts dumped on the ebook market.

      Of course paying by page actually read is a crude measure of a story's value, paying a flat royalty per download is even cruder.

      Personally I like a tightly plotted novels of 70-120 thousand words best, but we're living in the age of the endlessly sprawling epic.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    8. Re: Tell me... by davester666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, it is solely to make Amazon more money. The 'purchaser' doesn't pay less, but the writer gets paid less because Amazon just wants to pay them less.

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    9. Re: Tell me... by HangingChad · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
    10. Re: Tell me... by davester666 · · Score: 2

      without the 'kind of'

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
    11. Re: Tell me... by Damarkus13 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Except that this policy doesn't apply to "purchased" e-books. It only applies to the Kindle Lending Library.

    12. Re:Tell me... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2

      English, Math, History and Basic Science textbooks don't change much from year to year. If a subject was on the cutting edge in an advanced class, an extra handout might be added to the reading assignments. For many subjects, a ten-year-old textbook would work fine.

    13. Re: Tell me... by Shoten · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.
    14. Re: Tell me... by SumDog · · Score: 2

      Why is this critical fact missing from the summary?! What the actual hell?

    15. Re:Tell me... by GoddersUK · · Score: 2

      It's an incredibly misleading article they omit to mention that it is to do with the way Amazon divvies up royalties from the Kindle lending library, not to do with the way Amazon passes on royalties from actual purchases, until about half way through. At the end of the day the latter would be unambiguously wrong, the former seems not to be an unreasonable approach: It means the difference in value of books is recognised (i.e. a longer book, that requires more to write, earns more than a shorter one) (rather than a flat rate for all books, which is what the article implies is currently paid) and it rewards authors that add value to the library rather than authors whose books customers check out and then decide aren't worth reading.

  2. The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America by jfdavis668 · · Score: 3, Funny

    The sales of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification will probably drop like a stone.

  3. Bad editors by Sangui5 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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?

  4. Re:hey DICE newfags by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Refund? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Is the prorated cost of the unread pages refunded to the customer?

    1. Re:Refund? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is for the kindle "unlimited", so only borrows not buys. People were borrowing popular books, but never reading them. They also suspected that a reddit/forum brigade was borrowing without reading, so that a particular author could get money for a shitty book.
      The only downside is a technical book where people are borrowing it only for 1 or 2 chapters.

    2. Re:Refund? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      > 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.

  6. Different middlemen, same story by Mrs.+Grundy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Different middlemen, same story by turbidostato · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.

    2. Re:Different middlemen, same story by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Informative

      We're getting all worked until over a summary that doesn't actually explain what's going on.

      This is specific to Amazon's subscription services (e.g. Kindle Unlimited), and only affects how Amazon divvies up the fixed pool of money Amazon already allocates to reimburse authors whose works are being read as well art of those subscription systems. It used to be per-book; now it's per-page.

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    3. Re:Different middlemen, same story by Applehu+Akbar · · Score: 2

      If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.

      Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine. Tablets give you a better page presentation than the hard-to-keep-flat paperbacks real people are used to reading, and with a consistent illumination for the darkened corners where reading is actually done. You can carry as many books as you want on the road without giving up precious luggage space. Because nobody around you knows what you're reading, you can feel free to try works and whole genres you never contemplated before. E-books are still more expensive than they should be, but they are coming down.

      So because of Amazon, e-books are here to stay. If Amazon's rules are too odious for authors, new choices will pop up as fast as the market can provide them.

    4. Re:Different middlemen, same story by AthanasiusKircher · · Score: 2

      If Amazon accomplished nothing else, Kindle has sold the idea of the e-book to the reading public. Ten years ago, the Internet hipsters in places like Salon, Slate and even Slashdot itself sneered at the whole concept. Readers, they opined, would never give up the rich smell of the leather-bound editions they never bought, curled up beside the baronial fireplaces they didn't have, to read on a small screen.

      I'd never claim to predict what the general public will do, but as someone who has a collection of thousands of books, I tried out e-books, and I have absolutely no interest in them. PDF copies of books -- sometimes. "E-books" as reflowing text, often badly formatted, with illustrations messed up? No thank you.

      I will say that I read very little ephemeral fiction, though -- and for people who read that stuff, I completely understand the attraction to e-books. I can understand how e-books function as "disposable" books. For me -- I rarely buy a book unless I actually intend to keep it. If I want a book for a week, I'll take it out of a library.

      And if I intend to keep a book, I usually buy it because I want to be able to refer back to it. E-readers and e-book tools just lack the kind of consistent layout I'm used to with physical books. I can thumb through a paperback and have a clear memory of "yeah -- the passage was about 3/4 the way through, and there was a diagram on the upper left corner, with the passage opposite..." I can often locate the passage in a matter of seconds.

      I can't do that with a typical e-book. For books I ever want to refer back to, I'd prefer a stable pagination and layout. Not saying everyone has to want this -- but it's what I find works for me. (And yes, obviously you can put electronic "bookmarks" and comments in e-books, but often you don't realize what you want to refer back to until long after you've read the book... also "marking up" the book is often much easier with a physical pencil/pen or highlighter.)

      Today, e-books already account for over 30% of all books sold. Consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine.

      I'd be somewhat cautious about the conclusions you're drawing. Paper books sales hit their low point in 2012 -- they've been growing again since. E-book sales seem to have hit a plateau since 2013 and haven't grown much since. (Some studies even suggest a slight decline in sales, but it depends on whose stats you believe.)

      Yes, lots of people use e-books. But do "consumers seem to like the e-book idea just fine," or are there significant numbers of consumers who don't really like them or have tried them and decide not to convert? Or is it more like what I said above about myself -- people who like to buy "disposable" books like them, but others have doubts?

      I don't know what the long-term trend is going to be. Certainly I think some form of electronic book is here to stay. I have had scanned PDFs of books I frequently refer to on my computer for over 15 years. Those are useful to me. But e-books? I have absolutely no desire to buy them... and at least the trend in the past 2-3 years suggests that e-books have at least hit a temporary "wall" in their adoption process.

  7. Counting pages by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 5, Informative

    This isn't going to affect the majority of books. It's strictly for the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Online Lending Library portions, where customers can read the book without buying it. Simply don't make your books available through those programs, or limit them to initial books in a series or those likely to hook readers into wanting more of your works. Basically juggle the benefits of KU/KOLL exposure generating additional sales vs. the potential cost in royalties.

  8. Privacy again by Nkwe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  9. Uh by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.
  10. Only "rented" books--headline/summary misleading by R.Mo_Robert · · Score: 4, Informative

    As is usual, the headline and summary are sensationalized at the expense of truth: Amazon isn't doing this for all Kindle books. They're doing it only for self-published Kindle books (i.e., not ones from actual publishing houses, which comprise the majority of books most people actually read), and even then it's not for books that are actually purchased: it's for books read as part of the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited programs, which basically allow you to rent/check out participating books for "free" if you are in one of those programs (the former requires an Kindle reader or tablet from Amazon plus a Prime subscription, and the latter requires a monthly fee). Books people actually buy are unaffected, as are the vast majority of books in general even if they're rented. This is still an interesting model, but it's not as extreme as I thought from the Slashdot posting. I guess it would kind of be like Pandora negotiating a significantly lower royalty on songs that are skipped within the first few seconds.

    --
    R.Mo
  11. Not as bad as it sounds by JillElf · · Score: 2

    This actually sounds sane. According to the article, Amazon has two ways to borrow kindle books and authors are paid when it is loaned out (library and unlimited). It seems that the authors have been getting a share of what I'll call the loan pot money per book although I'm not sure how it compares to the regular selling price. The new system would reward authors that produced "page turners" and penalize those that didn't. Considering the number of times I've been given up on a book before finishing it, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least for fiction. The downside is that we as a society may read fewer of the new "great" books and more Stephanie Meyer clones. Then again, were we really reading the "great" books in the first place?

  12. Re:hey DICE newfags by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Insightful

    ... 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."
  13. Alternate headline: Amazon tracks what you read by OzPeter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
  14. Re:Only "rented" books--headline/summary misleadin by ZipK · · Score: 2

    Indeed, the article explains that the per-page metric will be used to divide the pool of cash that Amazon sets aside to pay authors of self-published books that are part of Amazon's lending library. This doesn't affect books that customers buy.

  15. An idea... by wbr1 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    How about a blockchain based e-book system? Each copy of a book is like a coin in a cryptocurrency. I would love to see this direct to authors, but other 'rightsholders' will get in the way. Regardless, when a sale is made it is tracked through the blockchain. The market sets the prices. So, if you bye hot new thriller for $20, the seller gets a cut as does the storefront. Then, if you transfer that book, a small percentage of your sale goes to the original author. If you give it to your uncle ernie for free, well you transferred ownership but not money, so nothing trickles upwards.

    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.
    1. Re:An idea... by Red_Chaos1 · · Score: 2

      Or, you know, stick to the tried and true method of "once it's bought, the seller and author are right the fuck out of the picture, and the owner can do whatever they want with it," as it should be. Seller and author get their cut on the sale, and never again, also as it should be.

      Anything else is greedy people trying to cook up greedy schemes in self interest only.

  16. Re:College students will be rich by stasike · · Score: 2

    One page in a Kindle book is defined as a number of bytes.

  17. Re:So they don't want reference materials or by jo_ham · · Score: 2

    educational materials to be published at all.

    I buy a reference book and only read the chapter I need for a current job, then the author is only compensated for 1/20th of what I paid Amazon and Amazon gets the rest?

    Someone sue Amazon publishing so hard that they can't find their god damn feet ok?

    How many reference books and textbooks are by self published authors and are part of the subscription-based lending library for ebooks?

    Oh, you thought this applied to all ebooks amazon sells?!

    Well, I guess the click bait headline does sort of suggest this, but no, as usual the summary is woefully bereft of proper facts.

  18. Goose Sauce by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.
  19. What about the people that convert to epub? by DeBaas · · Score: 2

    I actually published a book on performance testing on Amazon and have signed up for the KU program. I sell about 5 books per month. Living in the 'first world' I can safely say that the money isn't why I do it. I am still happy to see sales, cause that tells me people read my book. And it would be even more interesting to see if people actually read it. So for me, I'm not worried about missing out on a few dollars and may even get some more feedback.

    However, I also buy books in the Kindle store. First thing I do is to convert the books to epubs so I can load them on my Sony Ereader. I am sure I'm not the only one. How does Amazon handle those? Seems to me those are counted as not read even though the buyer actually read them. Just not on a Kindle reader.

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  20. For Symmetry by jnwrd · · Score: 2

    Why not have readers only pay when they also read a page, it would make people more willing to take a risk on new unknown authors. If the goal of Amazon's initiative is to make the market for books more efficient then discretizing the transaction of reading would do so.

  21. Also their service is optional by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 2

    You don't have to have your stuff on their subscription services. It is up to the author (or publisher, whoever controls the copyright). You can have all, some or none of your stuff on their subscription services. However, many choose to have stuff on subscription because it helps people discover your stuff, and while you may not make a lot per view/listen, you make some and it can add up.

    Pay per page view actually makes sense, as it helps reward authors that release stuff worth reading. If you do pay per book, then someone can release a book that look interesting, but has no substance. However if people have started reading, well they got their money, and they are done. With page views counting, then it is the stuff that is quality that people read to the end that gets rewarded.