There's a LOT more, so make sure you follow the link above to read the rest of the story.(Reuters) - It could soon pay more to write lengthier books, if you are an author self-publishing on Amazon.com Inc's Kindle ebook platform.Starting next month, the e-commerce giant will pay independent authors based on the number of pages read, rather than the number of times their book has been borrowed.
The move is aimed at authors enrolled in Kindle Direct Publishing platform – which lets authors set list prices, decide rights and edit the book at any time – and is applicable to ebooks made available via the Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners' Lending Library programs.
I don't like this, but I understand. A lot of self-published material is dreck. People buy an eBook or take one out on Amazon's loan program and think to themselves, I am NOT wasting my life on this garbage! So, I agree. If an author self-publishes dreck, s/he only gets paid for what is read.
If you will forgive what sounds like arrogance, this does not bother me. I think I publish readable works. If somebody purchases or buys any of my works, I suspect they are going to read it all the way through and I have proven to my readers that if they find a huge error, it will be corrected.
However, here's the elephant in the room .....
How does Amazon know how much of a book is read?
Privacy concerns anybody?
Well, I will make the observation that the Kindle has functionality that enables you to sync to the last page read across multiple devices (say, for example, if you have a Kindle, the Kindle app on your phone, and Kindle for PC, if you read up to a certain point on your PC, and then you go to your Kindle and open the same book, it will ask if you want to sync to the last point read from your PC). I'm sure there's some way that this could be used for nefarious purposes, but there is an eminently practical reason to be storing this information as well.
ReplyDeleteI know that the eReader device or program has to keep track of all that. That's logical.
DeleteWhat I'm asking is why does Amazon have to know that directly? Aside from knowing how much to pay their authors, what else are they doing with that information?