Quote:
Originally Posted by frahse
What you say is true, but a remedy need not include updating anything.
Amazon could simply limit the number "lent" per month or week. Amazon would then decide what to do in the future after accessing their more voracious readers' habits and proclivities.
There might not really be a problem, just a few show-offs.
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Well, it wouldn't be"Unlimited" if they capped the number of books, would it?
The problem wasn't the readers, but rather the scammer "publishers".
The way KU works is that every month Amazon sets up a payout pool that is divided by the number of pages read to set the payout for the month. So the scammers weren't stealing from Amazon but from the authors. The KU pool grows month to month by a few percentage points and the payout runs (for the US) in the 0.42 to 0.45 cent range per virtual page read. It may seem very low but in practice it delivers full-read payouts in the range of roughly 80-120 percent of sale payout. It depends on the length and price of the title.
The first thing is the scammers, even at peak, weren't making millions per month. The pool size is on the scale of ten million so a big scam would drop the monthly payout a lot.
Second, KU pagereads tend to be proportional to sales. On average a good book will generate 40% of its earnings from reads and 60% from sales. Some lesser titles generate more on KU than in total sales but it takes a poor book to come even close to 100% pageread revenue. And if that high ratio is tied to close to 100% completion...
Flag time!
KU is avery strange and interesting beast. Very data dependent while generating tons of priceless data on the side. The reader behavior and title performance data is so valuable that Amazon could conceivably be paying out all the subscription revenue, over $200M a year, and still be ahead. Doubtful but not impossible.
With all the data gathering they can flag al sorts of oddities. And the penalties are automatic expulsion, blacklisting, and forfeiture of all account revenue. Amazon may not be losing money but they hate when their data mining is polluted.
So yes there is scamming but not as much as you might hear online.
That scale of scam would be noticed in hours or days.
So there is no need to impact readers.
Especially since caps would upset the balance of the system.