Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
They aren't.
Apparently, all they are interested is outright purchases at full list.
It is like Hollywood only tracking DVD sales and ignoring all cable, satellite and streaming income.
For KU, the word from Author Earnings is that average payout from sales of ebooks in the Prime Lending Library is $2 and "coincidentally" Amazon has maintained the compensation pool size to deliver about $2 per read. For most authors in KOLL for the last three years, a read is the same as a sale.
Worse, at Oyster and Scribd, the 60% per-read compensation is no different than putting an ebook on sale for 40% off (which the BPHs have done regularly once agency ended) so not tallying up those paid reads just isn't defensible.
The best one could say is they're too lazy to try to get good numbers.
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I can only speak for the NYT bestseller list. They only count purchases made directly by customers. In other words, customers take their books to the cashier and hand over cash or credit card. The same goes for online purchases.
Subscriptions services have never been included by the NYT in the past. Subsidized purchases (such as Scribd & Oyster) aren't counted as they have proven to be abused to beef up sales numbers. Example: a group of people can easily flip through 10% of hundreds of titles each month forcing Scribd to blow through any cash reserves they have. The subscribers aren't paying for each "read" but Scribd is.