Quote:
Originally Posted by azayn
No argument about ebook costs to libraries but I beg to differ about #2. Amazon is no friend of Indie authors. They switched from paying authors a flat fee per book downloaded to six tenth of a cent per page read scheme which nets them considerably less money.
I'm also not impressed by the selection on Kindle Unlimited. Most of the titles are trashy romance/fantasy that I have no interest in. There's plenty of those kinds of stories on Wattpad and Smashwords. Good luck finding any non-fiction or Pulitzer/Nobel titles on KU. OTOH, library content is limited to high quality stuff which is worth the annoying holds sometimes.
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I didn't say they were friends.
It's business, not community potluck parties.
And the reason they switched payment schemes is because the catalog was getting choked with over-priced short stories, chopped up novels pretending to be serials, and all sorts of scams.
Now they're fighting other scams but at least the honest players providing good reads instead of Three Chapter Wonders get a payout approximating a full read.
Again, it is a feature; not a bug.
KU is not supposed to substitute for libraries or sales.
What it is really meant to do is substitute for permafree. That's it.
The authors who understand that KU is *for them* a marketing tool that pays instead of charging for the exposure are the ones making fair coin on KU.
For readers it is supposed to be a risk free way to try out works by new-to-them authors. Try out new genres. And it is meant for entertainment so non-fiction is probably not a good idea. You want a non-fiction subscription, try O'Reilly.
Frankly, a lot of writers are using KU the wrong way. Some have big enough fan bases that they end up cannibalizing sales. Others put their entire catalogs instead of series starters or new releases. Not the best way to use it.
But it's their right to screw up.
(shrug)
It's business. And in business transactions you give up something to gain something. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
The deal is simple: everybody gives a little and everybody makes a little. Readers get risk free reads of unknowns. Unknown authors get a chance to be known. And Amazon grows the Kindle ecosystem with books no other store can offer.
Amazon makes plenty of money *selling* ebooks, one by one. Why would they want to kill the Kindle store? What they do want to kill is permafree ebooks that cost money to store and manage but bring in no revenue.
So they substitute KU with an *intentionally* limited subset of authors and let avid readers vote their eyeballs in surfacing good books. Which is why KU reads contribute to book rankings.
KU is not intended to be the only source of ebooks or sales for either side.
If you're not interested in new authors, look elsewhere.
If you're an author that expects full list price just for looking inside the book, then stay out of KU.
It's purely voluntary on both sides.
Don't like it?
Don't play.