[Amazondoc]

Originally Posted by jhowell

I have no problem with that except for cases that result in the author not being paid.

Right. What I had in mind, though, was things like Kindle for Mac, Kindle for PC, Kindle for iPad, Kindle for iPhone, and so on. I was thinking of cases where a Kindle app, but not a Kindle device, was being used. I'm pretty sure we can all agree that any KU book should be "read" in whatever form we believe is likely to get the author paid before that book is "returned" to Amazon from whatever device or app is being used.

There is no need to record the start and stop time of each page. It could work by recording the start time when the user flips or scrolls the screen and then comparing it to the current time when a new page was displayed to see if it was long enough. If so then set the one bit that represents that page.

I'm very sleepy right now, but I can almost see this working -- with the provisos that you'd have to do something like key the start times for something like a specific word or letter rather than a "page" as such, to take into account the variable formatting, and the possibility of continual scrolling as opposed to paging, and assuming that the app always has access to a clock. And then you'd have to add up how many pages qualified for time spent and calculate the percentage of total pages qualifying. That seems kind of ridiculous to me, but I don't suppose it would take many bytes to record the results.

In any case I doubt that Amazon is doing anything this complicated. More likely they just use the highest page reached, as they did before, but also apply a sanity check based on the total time the book was open for reading to make sure that the user did not skip over to many pages to get there.

Given that the only thing they're saying is "number of pages read", and given the multiple devices and so on being used (meaning that the simplest method will be most widely generalizable across all apps and devices), I still believe that it's most likely the only thing they're paying attention to is the highest page reached -- but y'all have given me good things to think about, and you may well be correct in your suspicions.

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Hey folks, how does the current wordy and protracted discussion about how Amazon counts the number 'pages' read relate to converting KFX files with Calibre?

It really doesn't, except tangentially. It originally started with a comment made by a different poster who made a statement before I ever entered the discussion, and then took off when I started posting and included a reaction to that earlier post in my own entry. Sorry for the digression! But I think we've pretty well talked it out anyway, so we can return to our regularly scheduled thread.

And thanks to all who participated in both the on-topic and off-topic portions of my queries!