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Originally Posted by pdurrant
John Scalzi made an interesting point about the Kindle Unlimited subscription model.
With KU, ebook sales are a zero sum game for authors - one author's success means less money for other authors, since authors aren't paid a fixed sum per read, but a proportion of a fixed monthly pot of money.
This sort-of makes sense, since Amazon has a fixed amount (per subscriber) coming in to pay authors with from the KU subscriptions. But is it a good deal for authors?
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Now this is a major issue...
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We base the calculation of your share of the KDP Select Global Fund by how often Kindle Unlimited customers choose and read more than 10% of your book, and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library customers download your book. We compare these numbers to how often all participating KDP Select titles were chosen. For example, if the monthly global fund amount is $1,000,000, all participating KDP titles were read 300,000 times, and customers read your book 1,500 times, you will earn 0.5% (1,500/300,000 = 0.5%), or $5,000 for that month.
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Because how does Amazon know if someone has read more then 10%? The way I read is I download, put the eBook into Calibre, side load, and read with the WiFi off. Even if I had a Kindle, the WiFi would be off and thus, no way to track my reading. So even if I finish the book, Amazon has no way of knowing that I've read more than 10%. This 10% is garbage and it's not fair for the authors as there is no way to 100% reliably track this 10%.