
Amazon's New Plan to Pay Authors Every Time Someone Turns a Page - sergeant3
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/amazon-publishing-authors-payment-writing/396269/?single_page=true
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technofiend
This is to address people gaming the old system by turning in 10-30 page books
of barely readable garbage. Under that system authors were paid ~$1.30 per
book each time the reader passed the minimum 10% book length.

This encouraged a flight to short, low quality books. This new plan should
wash out low quality work as it's no longer profitable to publish pamphlets
with great titles and near Markov-chain levels of nonsense.

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akhatri_aus
Would this not encourage books to be larger with a lower density of content?

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__Joker
I think they will go for something like ( price_of_the_book)/(no_of_pages) for
a single page. So it should not be a problem though.

Historically I think, may be, some of the 19 century books like Charles
Dickens The Great Expectation may suffer from the problem you mention. These
books used to be published like periodicals like a single chapter would be
released each week(like soap). It made sense to lengthen them for financial
benefit.

I am not sure, kind of anecdotal, but I think lot of people don't read or
finish lot of books.

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oldgun
How about paying by the percentage of what the customer read?

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TheOtherHobbes
$CLIFFHANGER_CHAPTER_ENDING

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malloreon
It takes way too long for the article to note that this only applies to books
enrolled in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, which allows readers unlimited
access to opted-in books for $9.99/month.

Books regularly published through KDP are unaffected.

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hdevalence
Why is it acceptable for Amazon to be able to record every time someone turns
a page?

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freyr
Because it's the device they're offering, the version of the content they're
offering, and the service they're offering.

If you disagree with this practice, you're free to not accept the offer. It's
as simple as that.

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icebraining
Just because people are free to refuse it doesn't mean we must find it
acceptable and refrain from criticizing it.

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freyr
Of course you're free to criticize it, but declaring it "acceptable" or
"unacceptable" without justification isn't particularly helpful.

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joe5150
This really buries the lede! Only two mentions that this only applies to
Kindle Unlimited, and not until the seventh paragraph.

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nulltype
Well under the new rules the author is paid by paragraph read, not for the
whole article.

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minthd
This could offer the final blow to the paper book market:

Since they way to monetize ebooks will be totally different than paper books,
this means they'll need to be written in a totally different way.

So this means most authors will choose one or the other, and most likely
they'll choose to write only ebooks, because there's more money there.

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jayess
I currently publish several books of a legal nature on Amazon, both in print
and ebooks. I'd say my print book sales to ebook sales are 10:1 ratio in favor
of print books.

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vonklaus
That is interesting. When I read technical manuals I prefer them in print,
when I read for pleasure (lately) I have been reading digital. I am not sure
if this is conditioning from college or something else, but my experience is
in line with your comment.

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rajadigopula
If we are talking about Kindle - digital reading here - how does a "page"/
"page flip" be defined with varying factors like -

X devices a kindle app can be consumed on: A page can be of different word
length on a mobile than of a tablet?!

X What if I bump up the font size to max on my device? Could it still count as
a single page flip, if I flip the page?

==> Well the above is answered by Amazon with "Kindle Edition Normalized Page
Count (KENPC)" @
[https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN](https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A156OS90J7RDN)

-> Academic textbooks/ reference books/tech. books etc are not page turners. Are the authors of this kind at a disadvantage with the new model?

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myliverhatesme
I think the per page strategy is way too arbitrary. What is a page exactly? A
unit of measurement of text? How big is a page? What font must you use. What
about technical books and books with pictures and diagrams? If we invented
modern electronics before books we wouldn't care about pages. Measuring time
spent would be a lot more useful and harder to game. What if the book is dense
with so much good information that I feel the need to read slower or reread a
paragraph?

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jon-wood
Technically this is probably based on Kindle's location measurement, rather
than physical pages. Locations allow them to sync where you are across vastly
different devices without worrying about the fact that one may be a mobile
with a huge font size showing three words a page, and the other might be a
desktop reader with a tiny font.

