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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.
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...
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
Retroactive copyright extensions that actually do steal content from the public domain: Totally not a game rigged from the top down, apparently.
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.