This has nothing to do with purchases, and is for the lending libraries only. It's primarily a maneuver to limit some kinds of fraud and scams, or publishing techniques that game the system. Amazon makes no more money by applying this change.
This is completely inaccurate. See all the other notes that this is for the lending libraries only. Amazon pays out the same total regardless, but they're redistributing royalties in a way designed to better reflect reader enjoyment. This change doesn't result in Amazon keeping any more money than previously.
Currently you can perpetrate the exact same fraud with botnets downloading the book and never opening it or turning pages. This only makes it harder than it presently is.
This type of pricing will encourage creation of cheap novels and reference material a lot.
There's going to be a mix. It may encourage larger volumes, as long as those volumes are good enough to keep readers turning pages. It will discourage really awful/cheap materials, because if readers give up on it the royalties will drop. It will discourage authors gaming the system by breaking up one long "book" into lots of short novellas, and getting paid, say, 10 times for 10 novellas instead of once for one novel. It will discourage scammy behavior like flooding the market with lots of promising titles with real junk (possibly copy/paste of other works, or procedurally generated stuff, not just poorly written) or behavior like trying to use a similar title to pick up accidental sales, where a reader downloads it and then realizes it's it's the wrong thing and gives up on it. All of those misbehaviors will be punished by diminished royalties. Where before there was an incentive to just get the download so that you can get paid, now tricking them into downloading won't cut it. There has to be actual value inside the book to earn royalties.
I don't think the examples you cite will significantly affect the program. For instance, stalling on a page while you sleep doesn't do anything. Turning to a page today that you don't actually read until tomorrow doesn't do anything. Turning one more page, waiting until tomorrow, and then deciding the book is junk that you're not going to finish, gives the author credit for exactly one additional page read, which is a minimal difference in royalties.
The AC is basically quoting directly from Amazon's email describing the change, so it's accurate. See all the other posts about this only being for the pool of money Amazon uses to pay for books borrowed through Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Lending Library.
Yeah, the bundling drives me crazy. I get constant ads from Charter saying "get internet, tv, and phone for $30 each!" But I'm paying $60 for internet alone. Frankly, when their advertising sets $30 in my mind as the appropriate price for each of their services, I can't help but be ripped off paying twice that much. In other words, their advertising is making me angry with them.
I have zero interest in phone. I've asked about internet + TV, but for some reason that's $110, rather than $90, which isn't just a ripoff, it's insane.
72 hours? Hah. Recently for me it was about two weeks. I mean, yeah, they autoreplied to the ticket immediately, and I got a computer-generated useless response half an hour later. But once I responded to that it was two weeks, and when that didn't work, it was two more weeks for another go-round.
Now they did apologize a little, and they said they were working on dealing with one really big backlog, so maybe it's not always that bad, but I was pretty unimpressed.
Sure. But I think a response to that is to accept what you have to and then keep going. If you take a lowball wage just to make the rent, don't sit there for years waiting for things to magically get better. Use that new position as your fallback, and keep looking, because now you're not in the position where you're forced to say yes.
One of the golden rules of negotiation is..the first party to give a solid number is the loser.
People say this all the time. What nobody ever says is how to not be the first party to name a number. That would be a useful tip for someone to include here, if anyone has it.
I agree with you. That's why, as an author, I chose for my ebooks not to have any DRM. I'd rather someone who enjoyed my book lend it to a friend or family member and have them also enjoy it than not buy because of the DRM.
Frankly, I also don't really care how many individual readers download one of my books for their own enjoyment, especially if they take a moment to post a review or recommend it to someone else. That's darn near close enough to payment as far as I'm concerned. I do draw the line at anyone trying to resell my work as theirs, and there's definitely some discomfort at places like those in the article that might be profiting by giving away what isn't theirs to give.
This feature is of course a necessity for the coming zombie apocalypse. Imagine if you were trying to make a getaway, and a single zombie could stop your car by lurching in front of it. Something like that could single-handedly doom the straggling remainders of humanity.
Think about it some more. There is a place near the south pole where the effective circumference of the earth at that latitude is exactly one mile. So if you started one mile north of that spot you could go south, make the circle, and head north, and be back in the same place.
Then, as the GP says, there's an infinite number, because there's also a spot where the effective circumference is half a mile, a third mile, a quarter mile, etc., where you're just doing more laps around the same ring when you head west, before heading north.
A sign at a nearby farm read "cheese making beef eggs". I think it used to have dots/dividers between some of the words, but they'd faded. My wife saw it and said, "What are beef eggs? And how do you make cheese with them?"
I did the same thing as a child with coffee cake. The thing of it is, it took years before someone bothered to correct me and let me know there's no actual coffee in it. What a waste of a bunch of dessert.
I realize this analysis is about "popular" music, so this may not entirely fit. But last year I listened to one of those Great Courses sets on "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" and really changed what I've been listening to, which now includes quite a bit of concert music (baroque, classical, etc.) that I never really appreciated before. Am I an outlier that I'm picking up something new just as I turn 40, or does this not count because it's not pop music, and old fogies are supposed to drift into listening to this ancient stuff anyway?
I'd say I've also picked up a lot of new material recently because of Pandora, but I'll admit most of that is older music, where it's a genre/style I liked, but I somehow missed some of the artists from that era who are similar to ones I already liked.
While I'm dumbfounded by repeated arguments that there can't be any business model other than "selling a hammer" I also don't agree that 70 years is a reasonable span for royalties. A decade or two? Sure. That's a pretty good span for getting your money back from a creation. But by the time a work of art has spanned a generation, let alone two or three, it really ought to be open to the public to make use of it. Without getting too specific about where to draw the line, it seems to me like a decent rule of thumb that if something existed before you were born, by the time you're a fully grown adult it ought to be available for use in your own art without continuing to pay royalties.
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This has nothing to do with purchases, and is for the lending libraries only. It's primarily a maneuver to limit some kinds of fraud and scams, or publishing techniques that game the system. Amazon makes no more money by applying this change.
This is completely inaccurate. See all the other notes that this is for the lending libraries only. Amazon pays out the same total regardless, but they're redistributing royalties in a way designed to better reflect reader enjoyment. This change doesn't result in Amazon keeping any more money than previously.
Currently you can perpetrate the exact same fraud with botnets downloading the book and never opening it or turning pages. This only makes it harder than it presently is.
I don't think the examples you cite will significantly affect the program. For instance, stalling on a page while you sleep doesn't do anything. Turning to a page today that you don't actually read until tomorrow doesn't do anything. Turning one more page, waiting until tomorrow, and then deciding the book is junk that you're not going to finish, gives the author credit for exactly one additional page read, which is a minimal difference in royalties.
The AC is basically quoting directly from Amazon's email describing the change, so it's accurate. See all the other posts about this only being for the pool of money Amazon uses to pay for books borrowed through Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Lending Library.
Thus, it must be a letter! Except in hexadecimal notation letters are numbers, so 1/0 is a color?
Well, in the real world you also can't give two apples to half a person, so this whole analogy is pretty off.
Just throw an absolute value operator around it, and you're set.
Yeah, the bundling drives me crazy. I get constant ads from Charter saying "get internet, tv, and phone for $30 each!" But I'm paying $60 for internet alone. Frankly, when their advertising sets $30 in my mind as the appropriate price for each of their services, I can't help but be ripped off paying twice that much. In other words, their advertising is making me angry with them.
I have zero interest in phone. I've asked about internet + TV, but for some reason that's $110, rather than $90, which isn't just a ripoff, it's insane.
Well, if they "throw garbage out the car window" on the way to the American mall, apparently that's like stealing. According to her analogy, at least.
You may have said a lot, but it was seen and appreciated. Thanks.
Or people's pallets really so fucked up they can't distinguish between different types of meats?
My palate may be screwed up, but my homonym detector is in prime form!
72 hours? Hah. Recently for me it was about two weeks. I mean, yeah, they autoreplied to the ticket immediately, and I got a computer-generated useless response half an hour later. But once I responded to that it was two weeks, and when that didn't work, it was two more weeks for another go-round.
Now they did apologize a little, and they said they were working on dealing with one really big backlog, so maybe it's not always that bad, but I was pretty unimpressed.
Sure. But I think a response to that is to accept what you have to and then keep going. If you take a lowball wage just to make the rent, don't sit there for years waiting for things to magically get better. Use that new position as your fallback, and keep looking, because now you're not in the position where you're forced to say yes.
One of the golden rules of negotiation is..the first party to give a solid number is the loser.
People say this all the time. What nobody ever says is how to not be the first party to name a number. That would be a useful tip for someone to include here, if anyone has it.
I agree with you. That's why, as an author, I chose for my ebooks not to have any DRM. I'd rather someone who enjoyed my book lend it to a friend or family member and have them also enjoy it than not buy because of the DRM.
Frankly, I also don't really care how many individual readers download one of my books for their own enjoyment, especially if they take a moment to post a review or recommend it to someone else. That's darn near close enough to payment as far as I'm concerned. I do draw the line at anyone trying to resell my work as theirs, and there's definitely some discomfort at places like those in the article that might be profiting by giving away what isn't theirs to give.
This feature is of course a necessity for the coming zombie apocalypse. Imagine if you were trying to make a getaway, and a single zombie could stop your car by lurching in front of it. Something like that could single-handedly doom the straggling remainders of humanity.
Hah. I remember that one!
Think about it some more. There is a place near the south pole where the effective circumference of the earth at that latitude is exactly one mile. So if you started one mile north of that spot you could go south, make the circle, and head north, and be back in the same place.
Then, as the GP says, there's an infinite number, because there's also a spot where the effective circumference is half a mile, a third mile, a quarter mile, etc., where you're just doing more laps around the same ring when you head west, before heading north.
A sign at a nearby farm read "cheese making beef eggs". I think it used to have dots/dividers between some of the words, but they'd faded. My wife saw it and said, "What are beef eggs? And how do you make cheese with them?"
I did the same thing as a child with coffee cake. The thing of it is, it took years before someone bothered to correct me and let me know there's no actual coffee in it. What a waste of a bunch of dessert.
I realize this analysis is about "popular" music, so this may not entirely fit. But last year I listened to one of those Great Courses sets on "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" and really changed what I've been listening to, which now includes quite a bit of concert music (baroque, classical, etc.) that I never really appreciated before. Am I an outlier that I'm picking up something new just as I turn 40, or does this not count because it's not pop music, and old fogies are supposed to drift into listening to this ancient stuff anyway?
I'd say I've also picked up a lot of new material recently because of Pandora, but I'll admit most of that is older music, where it's a genre/style I liked, but I somehow missed some of the artists from that era who are similar to ones I already liked.
While I'm dumbfounded by repeated arguments that there can't be any business model other than "selling a hammer" I also don't agree that 70 years is a reasonable span for royalties. A decade or two? Sure. That's a pretty good span for getting your money back from a creation. But by the time a work of art has spanned a generation, let alone two or three, it really ought to be open to the public to make use of it. Without getting too specific about where to draw the line, it seems to me like a decent rule of thumb that if something existed before you were born, by the time you're a fully grown adult it ought to be available for use in your own art without continuing to pay royalties.
Well, it certainly won't happen in the reverse order.