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.

Comments

split fee at user level

[xlyz]

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.

Re:split fee at user level

[Sneftel]

Moreover, only split actually-paid fees (not trial accounts), and only after Amazon takes its cut. That way, there'd be no way for an independent cartel of publishers and readers to collude in a way that let them come out ahead.

That doesn't solve one of the problems the article mentioned -- driving up popularity and visibility, so that real readers end up buying fake books -- but that's a problem Amazon is already dealing with.

Re:split fee at user level

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the idea, but a downside would be to disincentive less popular authors.

I'm assuming more people will sign up to read popular books, so they in can be considered getting a cut from the general pool.

Then, each less popular author would be getting a cut from a percentage of the general pool. It could balance out if each less popular author gets a generally fair cut divided from the general pool.

But I'm going to assume a large readership of the general pool will not read any non-popular books. And that the less popular books will be read by a smaller group of big volume readers.

So then one might say "well, that's still fair, right?"

But, why would the small publishers even bother to be in the service. They leave, and get paid full price when the rare but determined someone wants to read their book.

So it is a tax on the more popular books, but it becomes a public goods issue where the service becomes more popular => more readers if there is a greater selection of books.

What's the problem?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Agreed.

[Anonymous Coward]

They also mention that they are depublishing their book before it can be reported. Another easy solution is to delay royalty payments for 90 days and require the book to stay published for the entire duration just like they do with "stock vesting". If you or amazon pulls the book or it has too many complaints, etc... then you don't get the commission.

Re:Another example of rigging the system

[T.E.D.]

I'm curious whether people naturally game the system because people are inherently greedy and dishonest...

Its this, sad to say. To misquote Kay from MiB: a person is nice, but people are greedy dishonest animals.

Let me illustrate with a (somewhat personal) story from the early 20th Century.

The Osage Nation in Oklahoma did one thing really smart (and lucky) that most other tribes didn't manage: When the federal government forced (yes forced) them to distribute their land to individual tribe members, they kept the mineral rights for the tribe. Then, in 1898, oil was found on their land.

Picture Beverly Hillbillies on a tribal scale. For a while, the regular checks from the oil revenues were not just enough to live off of, but enough to qualify recipients as fairly wealthy. By the 1920's they were like a rural Oklahoma version of Kuwait.

So in come the greedy a-holes. At first they satisfied themselves with declaring Indians "incompetent", and using the government guardianship to steal their money. But what they eventually started doing is finding themselves uneducated older Osages, tricking them into "adopting" them, and then killing them. At least 60 Osages were murdered in the first half of the 1920's.

The FBI was called in, but what finally stopped the carnage was when a law was passed that prevented anyone without provable Osage "blood" from inheriting an oil headright. Eventually the money tapered down to not enough to live on by itself, but the laws remain.

And this is why I, as an adoptee raised in an Osage family, don't get to call myself Osage. I'm not on the rolls with my Father and his people, because once upon a time money was involved, and people in general are sociopathic assholes.