
Notorious Kindle Unlimited abuser has been booted from the bookstore - saxatrumpet
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore/
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bambax
How much would it cost Amazon to assess the value of each book uploaded to
Kindle? Some AI process could be trained on "real" vs "scam" books and attach
a score, then humans could review the worst scores and then maybe investigate
the authors who post a majority of bad books.

Even after the fact, once a book is generating profits in the Kindle store,
one can think of many automated controls:

1\. It shouldn't matter that the old Kindles can't tell the pages you've read
(just the max page you reached), if the new ones can, because then, based on
the data from the newer Kindles, one can detect books where people only read
the first and last page (and then maybe investigate those books manually)

2\. Even if no Kindle device was able to tell the pages you've read, if it's
possible to measure the speed at which a reader reached the last page (date
book first opened - date last page read), then by comparing to similar books
of similar size it should not be difficult to identify outliers

3\. Etc.

My point is, for some reason Amazon doesn't want to police itself, neither in
the Kindle store nor in the general store (third-party sellers), which is bad
for its brand.

This is puzzling because it's irrational, and one would think Jeff Bezos is
more of the hyper-rational type...

So a piece of the puzzle is missing, but I can't see it.

~~~
Bakary
One explanation could be that he has simply not gotten around to thinking
about the problem yet.

~~~
ihsw2
Or he's fallen into the trap that popularity (and popularity=revenue) is an
adequate signal for quality, if third-party sellers are bringing in adequate
sales loads then there's nothing to fix.

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dangoor
The sucky thing about this is that the way Amazon pays out Kindle Unlimited
reads is through a pool they create each month. They essentially take the size
of the pool (say, $20 million) and divide by the total pages read and pay out
to each author depending on how many page reads they had.

In other words, scammers like this are taking money directly from authors
producing legitimate work.

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elyobo
Love the totally genuine comment there from "Diamond Girl" too...

> No real content??? As if. I LOVE Chance’s books, they’re amazing!!! LOL to
> theFivierrr idea, his books are proper legit. You write slander or libel or
> whatever it’s called. You should be ashamed of your bad journalism, ever
> fact checked anything?!

~~~
maushu
I'm pretty sure that is the author.

~~~
michaelbuckbee
Pretty sure the author bought some reviews on Fiverr as well.

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ryandrake
If you have an insufficiently moderated platform where users can upload
content, and you offer money to content uploaders based on some measurement,
you will get largely crap, but optimized for that measurement.

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jandrese
Any bets on if the drawing for the jewelery ever happened? That could lead to
actual criminal prosecution I think if he wasn't very careful with the
wording.

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TomK32
There's those multiple-choice adventure books where you have to either go to
page 43 or 26 depending on how you want to continue the story. That might be a
legitimate way to abuse the system and give the jewellery to your SO :)

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seanwilson
> Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your
> location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the
> scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by
> getting the user to jump to the last page.

Seems an obvious thing that would have been taken advantage of. Is there a
rational behind why they didn't want to track something like time per page or
time spent within one book? People don't like tracking I guess but statistics
like those can be interesting to readers as well.

~~~
jobigoud
YouTube does this. A "view" is only registered if the viewer has seen a
certain minimum amount of the video.

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edf13
Smart stuff from the guy who worked out the scam, though.

~~~
thomascgalvin
He's not wrong, he's just an asshole.

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sunstone
Not to mention that some people were using this scheme to launder money,
though typically with sky high book prices.

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apersona
Lol. The comments section in the article is pretty heated.

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fifnir
I'm sorry for the out-of-topic rant:

I got the "we care about your prinvacy" note, in spanish.

What do I have to do to convince the internet that I don't speak fucking
spanish? Yes my ip is in spain because I live here.

Is it really so hard for developers in 2018 to realize that IP does not mean
language preference?

<edit> And also, stop spoiling spaniards with providing everything translated,
this country needs to learn some english

~~~
mariocesar
Latin american here,

I like to read things in Spanish.

pd: give you a break, go to a walk, talk to nice people.

~~~
dingo_bat
> I like to read things in Spanish.

Cool but kind of irrelevant here. The point is that the website is ignoring
the preferred locale requested by the browser and relying on IP geolocation
for language. It can be infuriating for persons who do not understand the
particular language, and cannot read the content even when they have specified
their preference clearly.

~~~
mariocesar
My point is that is entitlement.

I browse the site and it defaults to English, and my browser is set to en_US
as locale.

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fifnir
How is it entitlement?

This is an american company, so default language is in english. Which I went
to the trouble of learning in order to "join the rest of the world", out of my
tiny homecountry.

They have their content available in spanish as well, which is great, but I
don't speak it (I do actually but I am so sick of it being forced on me)

All I want is the courtesy of letting me choose the language that I want them
to talk to me with.

Imagine if someone irl would only speak to you in spanish cause you're latino-
looking

