[simulacrumparty]

I know someone who used to make a living writing erotica for the Kindle store and experimented with using inklewriter to create interactive, CYOA-style stories. For a small donation to a charity, the inklewriter devs would compile a story to a static .epub which could then be published on the Kindle store.

He discovered that the compilation process essentially generated every possible page of text. For example, he would allow the reader to choose the color of the protagonist's hair (blonde, brunette, redhead) and then refer to a $hairColor variable throughout the text. Every page that used that variable would have to be generated three times, one for each possible value. This resulted in a text that was many hundreds or thousands of pages long, even for quite a short story.

At the time, Kindle used a very simple payment model based on the number of pages read. When a reader selected a path, they would jump forward hundreds of pages at a time, each one counting as a read page, and by the end Kindle tracked them as having read thousands of pages. Using this system, he went from earning 2 or 3 dollars for a cover-to-cover reading to literally hundreds of dollars per reading. Of course, they caught on to this and modified the payment policy as well as the thoroughness of moderation and the gravy train ended.

[giancarlostoro]

There were books using this differently where it would skip to the end to get a paycheck out of it. Thats probably why. Not cause of a CYOA. I think it was posted about here on HN. This is an interesting comment though. I hadnt thought of ever seeing a CYOA book in digital form but I guess it makes total sense.

Here's a prior discussion on another technique that's somewhat related called "stuffing":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17315249

I swear there was some weird one where you opened a book, and skipped to the end and it counted as reading 300 pages.

Another discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11520212