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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.
That's capitalist way!
nothing to see here - move along
And what are these "fake books"? Are they just jumbles of random text? Isn't Amazon vetting books to determine their legitimacy?
easy to dump wikipedia to a text file and then process into a kindle book.
This will bypass any "vetting" that is not a human being.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
If a schizophrenic wants to post an entire novel of word salad for sale, Amazon is more than happy to give them what they want and take a cut of what little money is there. How can you tell the difference?
There are thousands of books going onto amazon daily. Moreover, even if they had someone read the text, how do they know if it is "no market ever" versus "limited market"?
Some of the scammers get real blocks of text which is just something that would not realistically sell -- grab a doctoral thesis from your local university, and you have something that is perfectly reasonable english text, and even something that someone somewhere in the world will reasonably pay for. Amazon can't tell at a glance whether the market for this "book" is one copy (the authors mom will download it to show off the fact that her kid wrote this and got a PhD) or a thousand (if it is something that turns out to be groundbreaking enough that thousands of researchers around the world want a copy). Alternately, join a learn-to-write-novels group; a bunch of beginners will give you their first horrible attempt at writing a novel so you can comment on them, and now you have thousands of pages of really awful text that doesn't appear in any database of plagarized text. I could come up with a dozen other ways to spend an hour and get a virtually unlimited stack of text that no automated process can tell is worthless, and even a human will be unclear if it is junk that appeals to nobody or something that will appeal to a handful of folks somewhere.
Others, as pointed out in the article, will submit something that is a hundred pages of real text followed by the output of a random-text-generator. That is enough that a quick spot-check where amazon pays someone to read a few pages probably won't notice, and given the volume of stuff submitted to amazon, they can't realistically pay someone to read everything (much like how youtube can't realistically pay staff to watch every video uploaded and check them for bad content...)
Beats me, but my sister ordered a book off amazon once something about comedians; she knew I liked Jon Stewart etc.
The "book" was nothing but a verbatim cut and paste articles from Wikipedia. No chapters. No organization. No value add over the wikipedia content. And one of the entire later sections was about 30-40 pages of nothing but random garbage (that looked like a corrupt PDF file).
Here's an article on the subject...
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Am...
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
yes, and there is a monthly fund, a pot of money amazon dedicates to pay authors depending on what was read. 1.upload crappy books 2.pay poor people to "read" them 3. ? 4. PROFIT $$$$$$ long time ago i set up a kindle alert on fatwallet and slickdeals and every day it's crappy books that are "free" that get advertised
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
Aren't customers required to pay a subscription fee to be able to read the large collection of books in the first place?
Yes, I think ignoring anyone reading more pages than they are paying for (based on what Amazon pays writers compared to what the reader pays Amazon). Or better yet, scale their weight in the pay structure, so Amazon never pays authors more per customer than the customer pays them. It would also mean serious large scale readers would get counted less but it should make it possible to prevent this fraud.
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.
Bookbub is a good, legitimate site for cheap or free books.
Many times the authors give away one book of a series, hoping for sales of the others.
I consider this a reasonable business model (as the free books of this type that I have read were complete stories in-and-of themselves).
BlameBillCosby.com
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.
I wondered how 50 shades of grey was able to get published.
ereaderiq.com add amazon kindle books to watch list import your watch list into ereaderiq and it sends you email alerts when the price falls
I am not an average reader I don't think.
I have read 9 free books of about 300 words length in the last week alone.
It would be interesting to see where I fall in the "average" for Unlimited subscribers.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I have read 9 free books of about 300 words length in the last week alone.
I hope that's a typo. 300 words is about the length of a single page in a paperback. You aren't actually saying you only read 9 pages worth of text in a full week, are you?
Seems like Amazon could simply analyze which books are generating revenue and pay authors of those books.
I once bought a book off Amazon on Don Cheadle as part of a joke for my sister that was also just a Wikipedia dump. Since it was a gag gift and hadn't been reviewed yet, plus it was very cheap, I didn't get *too* mad. But frankly, with stuff like the article above, my own interactions with third-party retailers, etc..., I'm starting to think Amazon isn't doing enough policing. It is sort of like eBay back in the bad old days. Not saying eBay is safer than Amazon, just better than eBay of a specific timeframe.
Can the e-ink Kindles even display arbitrary fonts? It might be a rule that they only allow books that can be displayed on every supported device.
perhaps that's why they were free... only one page.
A 300 page book which is probably close to average size and would probably take me 4-5 hours to read not that I couldn't read faster but we are assuming I am lazily enjoying the book with some coffee, a snack, and my feet kicked up so let say an average of 4.5 hours 9 books a week, I wish I had 5.5 hours a day to kick back and enjoy a book.
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.
Yeah, pages not words.
I read at about double your speed, so the 3 to 5 hrs I usually get to read is plenty.
Granted, I work from home and often read while sitting on stupid "Status" meetings where normal workers would have to sit in a room and try not to fall asleep. That nets me an hour or two on a typical day, sometimes as much as 3.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I work from my home office and am familiar with those meetings, although I'm the one putting everybody to sleep.
Now I know why that guy wasn't listening when I told him there where 4 or 5 other departments waiting for him to finish so they could start... He was reading a book.
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.
Did any of the Native American tribes even have a written language? I assumed that all the written language was sounds translated into Latin.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Heck, how hard is it to publish the collected works of Shakespeare, after all, that would actually be a legal way to get a large book to use. It would also be incredibly hard to rule out as legitimate usage.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Many do today, which is really all that matters. Navajo, in particular, requires its own special fonts
That is interesting, I suppose that goes right along with the Navajo code talkers from WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?