[Kuiper]

One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you're on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

Amazon actively touts this "Whispersync" feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: "With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi).") One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)

Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited...

[dhimes]

Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read.

I don't like this anyway. If I buy a movie from Amazon Prime and only watch part of it, do I get a partial refund? Seems like they are shafting authors.

[Kuiper]

Since you seem to have missed the point of my "Netflix for ebooks" analogy (which you quoted): Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service where users can pay $10/month for unlimited access to a catalog of books that authors have chosen to list under the KU program. (This is how subscription services like Netflix work from a consumer standpoint. The difference from the creator side is that authors get paid based on how much people read their books, whereas Netflix funds productions up front, and then uses viewer data to make decisions about which shows to renew.)

The money that people spend on $10/month KU subscriptions is used to pay authors based on which authors people spent the most time reading (or, more accurately, which books you read the most pages of). If I read 400 pages of book A, and 5 pages of book B, then author A gets paid more than author B. I think the reasoning behind this should be pretty intuitive and obvious. Since every KU subscriber only spends $10/mo regardless of how much they read, there is a fixed "pie" to distribute to authors, and it makes sense to divide the pie based on which authors contributed the most to the readers' use of the KU platform.

Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through, because even if you quit reading one book, the fact that you stopped reading a book does not change the fact that you still have access to tens of thousands of other ebooks in the KU library for the remainder of that month, which is the thing that you are ostensibly paying for. (I don't phone Netflix to request a partial refund if I start watching the first episode of Bojack Horseman and quit halfway through the first episode, I just start watching Stranger Things or Narcos instead.)

If authors don't like this arrangement, they are free to not participate in Kindle Unlimited, and sell their books under a more traditional model (where the author sets a price, and people can buy the book for that price irrespective of any participation in any sort of subscription program).

[grawprog]

Wait so...

>Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through,

But...

Authors get paid by the page?

So Amazon basically gets to stiff authors on the refund that customers aren't getting but Amazon is applying internally to products customers use through their services by way of just not paying authors for content? Seems pretty fucked up to me and the only one that benefits is Amazon. Customers are left with something they don't want and authors aren't paid for their work while Amazon keeps the change...

[eozoon]

What the customer paid for is a subscription where they get to read anything they want for however long they want. They don't pay per book, so there's no "left with something they don't want".

Presumably when they stop reading Book A after the 5% mark, they would move on to Book B and Amazon will then pay the author of book B. So Amazon is paying someone for the whole duration that the customer is reading from their collection.

Personally I think it's a fair arrangement. Some of the "books" are really low effort cash grab that you'd literally open, read 3 pages and drop - it'd be unfair if they got paid just as much as well written works of the same length that you finish reading through.

[dhimes]

So if I read a book for a day and stop at the 20% mark; then come back to it a month later and finish it, does the author then get 100%?

[mewpmewp2]

It seems likely to me that if user pays 10usd, Amazon will take it's cut like say 30 percent. Following 7usd will be divided amongst authors according to pages read. Each author will get 7 * pages read that month / total pages read that month.

For example if user reads one page of one book this month this author should get 7usd.

Medium works the same way except with reading time and maybe claps.

This at least is the most logical, fraudfree and fair way to do this.

[Kuiper]

Authors get paid monthly, approximately two months after the royalties are earned. So if you have a KU subscription and you read 20% of a KU book in January, the author will get paid for those pages in March, and then if you continue reading book and read the remaining 80% in February, the payment for the pages that you read in February will be included in their April statement.

[Kuiper]

The post you are responding to is about Kindle Unlimited, and not regular Kindle ebooks. Kindle Unlimited, as stated in the post, is Amazon's subscription service where people pay a $10 monthly fee for access to all ebooks in the Kindle Unlimited library. (Or, as I explained it, "Netflix for ebooks.")

The "authors get paid per page read" model is only for Kindle Unlimited, not for regular Kindle ebook sales. When you buy a Kindle book for $6.99 or whatever, Amazon sends the money directly along to the author (or their publisher) after taking their cut, just like you'd expect.

But if you pay $10 a month for a Kindle Unlimited subscription, and read a dozen books by different authors, Amazon has to figure out how to split that fixed monthly subscription fee between all the authors that you read; paying authors based on page reads seems like the best way for your KU money to go to the authors/books that you actually read.

[grawprog]

This is a response to everyone kinda...

If I had a subscription with a book store that offered me N amount of books a month for a fee, the book store would still need to buy copies of said books from the publisher, who would pay the author whatever was worked out in their contract per sale, whether or not I read one page or the entire book. How is Amazon's model different than that?

[Kuiper]

Again: Netflix. For. eBooks.

It used to be that if Blockbuster wanted to rent out Raiders of the Lost Ark to six different customers simultaneously, they needed to own 6 VHS copies of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Now, with streaming, Netflix doesn't have a finite number of "copies" that they can lend out at a time; if every single Netflix subscriber in the country decides that they want to start watching Indiana Jones right now, the only thing preventing Netflix from providing that is their bandwidth, because Netflix has worked out an arrangement with Paramount Pictures that allows them to do this.

Likewise, Amazon has an arrangement with KDP authors that says, "We lend your ebook out to as many KU subscribers as want it. At the end of the month we pay you based on how much people read your books." If an author doesn't like the terms of the KU program for any other reason, they are free to decline the subscription model and sell their ebooks through the regular "customer pays fixed price for ebook, I get money from sale" model. In fact, most authors don't opt into KU; there are a millions of Kindle books, and only tens of thousands of books in the KU program.

Because you pay a fixed subscription fee and the money gets divided between all the authors you've read, it's effectively zero sum: if Amazon wants to give more money to authors who wrote books that people dropped after the 1st chapter, that means less money for the authors who wrote books that people actually liked enough to read past the first chapter. Amazon has structured their program to reward authors for writing books that people consume more of, which seems like a good way of rewarding creators based on the value that they contribute to the platform. If you don't like it, don't opt in and instead sell your books the "normal" way.

[geofft]

Amazon's model is different because it's electronic and therefore sustainable because they can do this trick.

When was the last time you saw a sustainable private library (i.e., funded by membership fees, not by taxes)? Were the fees $10/person/month?

[eh78ssxv2f]

The "change" that Amazon keeps can be fixed irrespective of how they distribute the money to the authors.

Lets say user pays $10/month fee. Amazon decides it wants to keep $2 and distribute $8 to authors. Now, there are different ways of accomplishing that:

(i) Distribute proportionately based on which books user downloaded. If user downloaded N books during the month, author of each of the books gets $8/N.

(ii) Distribute proportionately based on amount of time spend by user on each book. If user spent T hours in Kindle during the month, and T_1 time on one of the books, then the author of that book gets $8*T_1/ T.

There are pros and cons of both approaches in terms of fraud prevention, user engagement etc.

[aratauto]

Apparently Amazon initially paid authors by e-book downloaded by users, but some authors abused this model. E.g. by splitting a 300-pages book to 6 50-pages books. It also enabled plain fraud, where fraudsters created accounts to download large numbers of books from Kindle Unlimited paid by unscrupulous authors.

[exolymph]

It's opt-in, you don't have to make your books available for Kindle Unlimited.

[SlowRobotAhead]

It's got to favor certain types of authors/books though. The amount of finished random romance novels has to stomp all over the number of times a "Learn to Code in 21 Days" book is finished :) Seems like a good way to change the quality of books on your service.

[Kuiper]

Your intuitions are correct; romance novels and thriller novels tend to be the most successful genres on Kindle Unlimited. Different pricing/distribution models attract different kinds of customers. (On the other end of things, I have seen engineers pay $30+ for PDFs about technical subjects without hesitation; I don't often see people spending that kind of money for romance ebooks.)

For similar reasons, the quality and genre of made-for-TV movies currently airing on the Hallmark channel is probably different from what you could experience for the cost of a ticket at your local movie theater: one of these distribution channels caters to people who want to consume several hours of content every day at no marginal cost beyond the monthly subscription that is already part of their budget, while the other caters to people who are willing to pay $15 to spend 2 hours watching a film that a studio spent millions of dollars marketing to them.

[lonelappde]

The code book has longer dwell time, though.

[Wowfunhappy]

But with Kindle Unlimited, you run into the "Someone Else's Money" problem.

Say a user reads the first page of 100 different books—they can do that, because opening each new book has zero marginal cost for the user. Does Amazon now need to pay authors for 100 books?

I don't know how Netflix payouts work but I have to imagine that viewer time is taken into account.

[Kuiper]

My understanding is that Netflix just pays a fixed, pre-agreed amount up front (either paying a licensing fee for existing content, or funding the production of their own Netflix originals). If lots of people view a show, Netflix takes that data into account when deciding whether or not to renew the the licensing contract (in the case of existing shows) or order a new season (in the case of Netflix's original productions).

Because Netflix pays for their content up front, they have to take a bit of a gamble. (Maybe they spend a bunch of money for a new Coen Brothers film, but nobody watches it, so they take a loss on that project. Or, as was the case in 2008, maybe TV networks grossly under-estimate the value of their catalog of old shows, so Netflix gets to pay peanuts for the content that serves as the bread and butter.)

[michaelbuckbee]

To your question of "Does Amazon now need to pay 100 different authors?" the answer is "yes".

My understanding is that they tally that up and pay each of the authors at the end of the month with a single payment of the KU revenue, directly paid for books, etc. As each book can be bought multiple ways. Though note this only applies for self-published books as otherwise, it all goes back to the publisher.

[portmanteaufu]

You've changed the question. Amazon already pays 100 different authors in this scenario--they each get paid for the single page that was read from each of their books. Paying for 100 books would be much more expensive than paying for 100 pages like they do now.

[m463]

The question is -- if you turn whispersync off (and popular highlights and real-time hightlights etc...)

Does Amazon respect you and turn off data collection?

Or better yet - does it ask you before turning it on?

[rtkwe]

There's a less invasive way to do that though by storing the latest location for each device. You don't need to store each and every page turn for the page sync feature.

[Kuiper]

This is apparently how older Kindle models worked, which has made them an attack vector for fraud on Kindle Unlimited:

>KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's self-publishing platform] pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. ...

>The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.

>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. ...

>Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited...

[jbob2000]

Then the next news article will read "Amazon stores the locations of where you are in your ebooks!".

You can't have your cake and eat it too, amazon needs to store something to make this feature work.

[wizzwizz4]

“Amazon stores the locations of where you are in your ebooks!” is not newsworthy.

[tqi]

How is "tapped on page 11" different from "is on page 12"?

[plicense]

A lot of Kindle content is reflowable meaning every character is addressible, so they should know which word boundry you clicked on.

Of course this is impossible to do in fixed formats like PDF, but 4 years back I specifically worked in Kindle content to make PDF books reflowable :)

[alpaca128]

90k rows of "tapped on page X" is definitely different from "is on page 12 in book Y" with exactly one entry per book.

[giaour]

If every tap generates a “[TIMESTAMP] $USER is on page X in book Y” event, then the there is no difference between recording tap events and syncing progress state in terms of what the client is reporting.

The difference lies entirely in what WhisperSync is storing, which you can neither know nor control.

[Godel_unicode]

You might be surprised to learn that you can both know and control, using the mitm approach from the below thread about KSP:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=174403

[tqi]

"Is on page 12 in book Y" at what time? If you send an update every time position changes, then there is no difference.

[rtkwe]

There's a difference between storing every single tap and just storing the latest position for each book and device pair. And the Kindle doesn't update whispersync every page tap anyways it syncs periodically so the Kindle is storing that tap info and sending it all so it's not like this is just a factor of logging the data it gets sent for updating page position. [0]

[0] I think Kindle on Android is the worst for this. Sometimes I don't get the position synced to my Kindle even 30min+ after leaving the Kindle app. Seems like the way to guarantee the server gets updated is to either exit the app or to return to the library.

[Godel_unicode]

There's a "sync" button. It's in the top nav on physical Kindles and the hamburger menu everywhere(?) else.

[kodablah]

What is stored is the discussion here, not what is sent.

[amf12]

Regardless, I fail to see how storing each update is more invasive than just storing the last update when the same number of requests are sent to Amazon.

[alkibiades]

right but that’s how you’re storing it. either way you logged it 90k times, one scenario you’re just creating a new row instead of modifying the existing row

[bduerst]

Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't that how whispersync works now?

[jordache]

How is recording a tap invasive?

[rtkwe]

It's just another accumulation of data unnecessarily just having the last page I read for each device doesn't tell you much but having a history of all of that gives Amazon information about my habits and combined with info about the book maybe mood etc.

[alkibiades]

so how is that implemented? wouldn’t you just record the current page each time it changes? which is essentially the same as loggingh page turn?

[rtkwe]

You could just store the last location for each device which is much less useful for datamining. Any time series of events contains much more information about habits than just most recent X.