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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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
>> 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.
Should be that each individual's subscription money goes proportionally to the authors they read. One page farmer could only cause as much damage as the money he is putting in (minus Amazon profits, of course). Seems like a simple page limit or similar could nip this in the bud.
I wondered how 50 shades of grey was able to get published.
Retroactive copyright extensions that actually do steal content from the public domain: Totally not a game rigged from the top down, apparently.
Retroactive copyright extensions that actually do steal content from the public domain: Totally not a game rigged from the top down, apparently.
I absolutely concur with you about the ridiculous laws that have created ex post facto copyright extensions. I'm a big fan of the original copyright terms of 1790, and everything that's more than a few decades old should be in the public domain.
HOWEVER, that has little to do with GP's point. Go on any torrent site and witness the number of people who are currently downloading movies, music, tv shows, books, etc. from this year. Do the same for material of the past decade (or even 28 years, if you prefer an actual copyright term).
Now, go on the same site and look at how many people are downloading materials that are over 30 years old. Sure, there's some stuff up there, but it's tiny compared to the amount of current content being pirated.
You're right to complain about how copyrights should expire within reasonable terms. But the VAST majority of piracy is of material that would be under copyright even using the shortest copyright terms ever available historically. Piracy is therefore mostly about "I wanna have new stuff now!" and less about some sort of protest against how Mickey Mouse cartoons from 1930 should be in public domain... how many people are actually taking that stuff?
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.