The Kindle Unlimited came up with a very interesting proposal: you pay a fixed amount per month – in Brazil, R $ 19.90 – and has unrestricted access to thousands of books. independent works can also be part of the collection available in the service. It’s a great opportunity for authors of ebooks or who aims to stand out in the literary scene. Too bad there are always bad apples:. There are people using dishonest tricks to make money with the program
Compensation for page read
As the Kindle Unlimited is not a sales volume-based service , Amazon implemented a peculiar form of remuneration: first, the authors were paid according to the number of downloads of their works; but in June last year came into effect a payment page read model.
This means that if a Kindle Unlimited subscriber only read half a book of 100 pages, the program will pay the author a corresponding to 50 pages. If the book is read at other times by the same user, these additional readings will be unpaid. Only the first is that account
As subscription provides unlimited access to the service collection, many users download many books out of curiosity or interrupt the reading at the beginning when they discover that the work is not interesting. – or simply do not pay. In this process, books just “forgotten”. This situation explains the concern of the Amazon to remunerate authors for page read, not for download.
But some wise guys found that KENPC (Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count), the system determined the number of pages read, has a limitation:. to make the count, the engine uses as a reference the last page of each synchronized book by user
so if you stop reading a book on page 30, your account will be synchronized to store the information that the pages 1 to 30 were read. So you can return to reading where you left off, regardless of the device used for this purpose (you can get a Kindle, and continue reading on your smartphone, for example). This same information serves as a parameter for KENPC assume how many pages you’ve read (again, pages 1 to 30).
tricks
Members of the community around the Amazon found, however, that some participants in the program were (or still are) getting circumvent this system from three main methods.
in one, the trickster author puts the index or a list of specific content at the end of the book, forcing the reader to go to the last page to find out where to start. If you stop there, KENPC can understand that most of the book was read.
Another trick, most ingenious, is the inclusion of translations of certain content for multiple languages in the same publication (often without care no, using services such as Google Translate for this work) with the English version being left finally, after all, most users read that language, which makes the jump to the end of the book.
there is also the strategy of filling books with useless content – often with 3000 pages, the maximum supported by Amazon for counting purposes -. and put links at the top that lead to the final pages
in this last trick , evaluations of users can make clear to other readers that the book does not pay, right? Not exactly: also found that many pages of these “works” on Amazon received false positive reviews just to lure unsuspecting readers
consequences
This is bad for the Kindle Unlimited subscribers. after all, they are subject to dubious or notoriously bad quality books. But are the legitimate authors who strive to provide relevant content that end up being most affected.
To make the payment of royalties, Amazon provides a monthly fund based on various parameters such as price policies , exchange rates and taxes. If in a month the fund is $ 10 million and there are 100 million pages read, the amount will be divided by this amount. Thus, if an author had ten thousand pages read, he will receive $ 1,000 that month (US $ 10 million multiplied by 10,000 author pages divided by 100 million pages read).
Note that with this system, Amazon costs remain controlled, ie the value of the background image does not increase significantly even if the amount is greater author. But the honest writers end up getting less because share gains with participants who used gimmicks to inflate the number of pages read.
Amazon reacts, but without fanfare
Amazon has been sought for comment, of course, but prefers to keep a low profile, “not to give important information to potential transgressors, we will not discuss the details of the tools we use to check for abuses, but we are constantly working to improve them “said a company representative.
But now you can see that some preventive measures were put into practice. Many fraudulent ebooks have been removed and policies were changed recently, for example, prevent indexes or tables with links to content are placed at the end of the book. There are already reports of authors who adopted this approach (even without malicious intent) that have been reported by Amazon on the need to reformat their works.
originally Published in 1995, the Metropolitan series, by Walter Jon Williams, had to be reformatted to fit the new rules
in addition, Amazon has adopted techniques to block cheating. The company’s systems are already able to notice that a user moved very quickly to the final pages of a book and in these circumstances do not count – anyone can read hundreds of pages in minutes
It is true that systems like this are complex and thus they can not be developed from night to day. Not to mention that even the simplest measures require care: effectively count all the pages read, for example, help prevent fraud, but could increase the user’s internet spending (each page read would require sending information to the company’s servers) or worse, hurt privacy policies
As you can see, the real challenge of the Amazon is finding a balance:. combat fraud, but avoid the actions to prevent harm the user experience and the participation of authors who play clean. Technical capacity for that Amazon has. I hope that good will also
With information. Observer, Ann Christy, BoingBoing
