[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.

[mirimir]

It doesn't jive with Amazon's income from the book. I doubt that users pay for books on a percentage basis. So if someone buys a book, but doesn't read it, then Amazon gets the income, but isn't paying royalty on it.

That seems illegal.

[Kuiper]

Note: this thread is about Kindle Unlimited, which has a different monetization/payment model than regular Kindle ebooks. KU readers do not "buy" KU ebooks, any more than Netflix users "buy" the TV shows that they are streaming.

If someone pays $10/mo for access to a library of tens of thousands of books but doesn't actually read any of them, then Amazon gets income without having to pay royalties, in the same way that Netflix still gets your money if you subscribe but don't watch anything. This is true even if you decided to subscribe to KU/Netflix because "Oh, I should get around to reading Harry Potter/watching Stranger Things" and then don't get around to actually reading Harry Potter or watching Stranger Things. This is very much legal.

[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.

[grawprog]

Netlix might be a poor counter example:

https://dvd.netflix.com/

They still offer this service.

[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.