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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.
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.
I'm curious whether people naturally game the system because people are inherently greedy and dishonest, or whether they're greedy and dishonest because the system itself appears rigged and gamed from the top down and they're only adapting to a broken system.
The former. Witness the number of people on here and elsewhere who will give every excuse imaginable why they don't pay the people for the work they've produced but instead pirate it because it's free.
They're greedy because they believe they are entitled to everything for free and dishonest because they make excuses for why they shouldn't pay someone for the work which has been produced.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Not only is Amazon happy but they have a whole range of vanity self-publishing services to extract money from them all along the way. It doesn't matter to Amazon if the author has crapped out some incoherent screed on paper providing they get a cut from it.
>> 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.
Funny enough it was done this way to prevent this exact type of fraud. In this case, they wanted to prevent authors from uploading crap then incentivising people to download it. Or even legit authors from using social media and such to get people to download their book knowing they wouldn't read it, just to "support" the author. Guess they didn't see this one coming though.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Retroactive copyright extensions that actually do steal content from the public domain: Totally not a game rigged from the top down, apparently.