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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.
The sales of The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification will probably drop like a stone.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
... 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.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
Except that this policy doesn't apply to "purchased" e-books. It only applies to the Kindle Lending Library.
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.
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