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The 10% thing is actually a benefit to writers - well good writers - under the current scheme whether the payout comes from a fixed pot of money. If every borrow counted, regardless of how much was read, then it would dilute the payout even further.
But it's that element, not what counts as a read, that makes it a bad deal for writers. Any deal where the buyer can arbitrarily decide to change what it pays the seller (i.e. the size of the pot) is not a good deal for the seller. You could double your sales and you don't know for sure whether your revenue will increase in line with that, or even fall.
You can see why Amazon does it that way - because they want to control their costs. Usually subscription services have to rely on most people under-using it to come out ahead. In the case of KU it seems that Amazon is trying to attract precisely the kind of people who will over-use it. Because they're really trying to lure them away from Scribd and Oyster. But the people using those services are exactly the ones most likely to be voracious readers, which will cost you a lot in a pay-per-read/per-borrow model.
Solution: cap the pay out.
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