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Kindle Unlimited Scammers Gaming the System At the Expense of Real Authors (annchristy.com)
Reader saccade writes: Kindle Unlimited is Amazon's book service that lets customers "check out" any book from a large selection without paying for individual titles. Like most things on the Internet, it's fallen prey to scammers. The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read. However, scammers have figured out how to rig the system by posting large, fake books, then hiring click farms to "read" them. This doesn't affect people using the service to read books (other than the nuisance of occasionally stumbling over bogus titles), but legitimate authors are getting squeezed as more of the KU payment pool goes to thieves and their bogus books.
Aren't customers required to pay a subscription fee to be able to read the large collection of books in the first place?
That's capitalist way!
nothing to see here - move along
And order the Kindle Krap. Operators are standing by
don't share money from a common pool, but split each user fee based on his readings. spammers will still get some money, but only from people that actually read their books: not so many I would say.
>> The system is designed to pay authors out of a single pool of money based on how many pages of their books are actually read
Seriously? I guess I'll have to start writing wordier and larger then.
It's nearly 4 billion pages long, at one word per page, because I'm edgy.
These books are identified, the authors that claimed them via KDP are known legal entities (KDP authors have to enter USA SSNs - even when resident elsewhere). With this information Amazon merely needs to forward it on to the FBI's cyber-crime dept who will gladly prosecute the fraud cases. The money comes back, assets taken by the feds, etc, and details passed on to crook's native police.
Isn't this the same way IBM's LOC payment system worked?
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
they've not actually stolen anything have they? they've created a new work of art, that just happens to be junk.
sag
You can't trust anything on the Internet anymore. If you go to a review website hoping to find legitimate reviews by real customers for a product, service, or company; be prepared to encounter hundreds of "phony reviews" that are posted by paid shills to write glowing reviews for crappy products. People are paid to hype things on social media and programmers are busy creating bots to automate stuff like that too. You might see two comments on a forum; one has hundreds of "likes" and the other has none; but all the likes are generated to give the false sense of popularity. As usual, the crooks and scammers are ruining it for everyone else.
The click-farm pays only because the limit of money that can be farmed is higher than the amount each farm-account must pay to buy in to the service. Increase the granularity of tracking and pay distribution, and this problem is solved.
Unfortunately, that increases complexity and overhead costs of implementation. It may be cheaper to work on ways of automatically detecting click farms and banning those accounts.
Never understood why they do it like SUM(pages read)/users instead of SUM(pages read/user). That way a bot reading 10000 pages doesn't matter, it'll still only distribute it's own subscription fee. Granted, it'd be a lot harder to audit since rates would differ slightly but surely you can have some independent audit verify that you're not skimming extra off the royalty pool.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yet another example of why we can't have nice things.
Joyce had a big enough body of work to say he does not fall in the second category, but if this book came along today, how would you tell? Maybe this is the Kindle equivalent of comparing one of those paintings made by an elephant given a brush with "real" abstract art.
Might be a prolific author, but doesn't write large fake books ...
Seems like Amazon could simply analyze which books are generating revenue and pay authors of those books.
The 'pool of money' thing is a nasty bit of business anyway - it's horribly unfair to authors for Amazon to be deciding how much the lot of them will get to split, then effectively make them fight over it.
This scam would only hurt Amazon (and thus give them an incentive to fix it fast) if it weren't for the pool of money concept. As it is, they don't have to do anything until enough real authors bail out that there's nothing good to read.
A thousand pounds of wood moving at 300 feet per minute. Don't get in the way.
This is a design failure, not an implementation failure. Buy a book, get a book. Nothing wrong with that paradigm. More and more vendors want to grind content down to finer and finer granules, as it ends up increasing their profit.
Have a fee to be listed on the unlimited program. Let anyone buy a book uploaded but if the author wants the book included in the unlimited package... require an additional fee which goes to have someone actually check the book out to make sure it isn't bullshit.
And then have metrics in place where in the money from the unlimited program are held for a trial period if the author is unknown. If unusual metrics pop up... such as huge sales... possibly investigate again more closely. The money shouldn't be delayed more than a month or two for the trial period. Sales that explode immediately after the trial period would also be a red flag.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
The best soultion for this would prabably be to limit the impact a single subscriber can have on the distripution of the pool. Any daily reading from a scubscriber above, say, the equivalent of 50,000 words should be disregarded. That way, the cost of the subscription would be too high for the generated sliver of the pool.
There may be a violation of Amazon's T&Cs, but that's not the FBIs job to deal with.
The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and other wire fraud statutes give the FBI jurisdiction over TOS violations. You might have heard of the CFAA from the Aaron Swartz tragedy.
Why can't a cover band in such an ASCAP desert buy its own portable license from the major performance rights organizations that covers any venue of a given size class that the band performs in?
Two tips:
1. Choose a band that writes its own songs. Such a band collects "publishing" royalties on the musical work in addition to royalties on the sound recording.
2. Choose a band that isn't signed to a major record label, one that still owns its own recordings. Such a band collects a larger share of royalties on the sound recording, even if it does pay a distributor such as CD Baby.