Quote:
Originally Posted by mitford13
I've always understood that trad pub borrows are treated the same as a sale, for the most part. They've never been part of the monthly pool that gets split up among the KDP KU authors.
This was in Publisher's Lunch when the program first started:
"...The company had previously offered Hunger Games for borrowing through the Kindle Owners Lending Library, though they did so without any specific permission from Scholastic, which was paid full price on each lend. Scholastic spokesperson Kyle Good confirms to us that it is “the same situation” for Kindle Unlimited — Amazon informed Scholastic they would be including the books in this program and “they have the right to do it” under their current contract, though there was “no new negotiated deal” specifically covering this usage. As with KOLL, Scholastic will get paid their full wholesale price every time one of their ebooks is opened by a Kindle Unlimited subscriber.
Other wholesale-basis publishers who declined Amazon’s offers to authorize participation have reported the same thing as Scholastic: That Amazon told publishers the etailer has the right to include ebooks in the initiative without permission, as long as they pay for each open as a regular sale. Offers made to publishers to directly authorize participation were similar to the way existing subscription programs such as Oyster and Scribd operate, where the publisher is paid full price after a certain specific percentage of any book is read."
http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.c...ffer-probably/ |
Those titles were never part of the core business model but were more like sweeteners added to the mix to draw in the tradpub-focused. Seeing them phased out after 18 months doesn't say anything definitive about KU economics; maybe they can't afford them--maybe they can but choose not to. The bulk of the catalog has always been Indie, not tradpub, as critics have always pointed out.
Which means the removal of some, or all, full price tradpub titles could just as easily mean Amazon thinks KU is big enough and strong enough it doesn't need them anymore. Certainly there is no big wave of complaints or cancellations coming from subscribers, is there?