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Originally Posted by haertig
How about some payment method that does not require them to know how many pages have been read? Base payment on something else, the obvious thing being that the book was borrowed or bought in the first place. Kind of like everything else in this world.
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Because authors try to cheat the system.
If it is just on number of books borrowed, they split one real book into single books per chapter. If it is books borrowed * number of pages, they combine lots together and pad it out to make one huge book and go for a click-bait title. If it is just number of borrows, not any metric of whether it was read or not, they get people or bots to just check the book out and never read it.
The system has gone through several iterations to make it harder to cheat or automate with bots.
The current system rewards authors whose books people actually choose to read all the way through, at the expense of authors whose books people read a small amount of and give up on without finishing.
That seems like a good outcome.
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Amazon came up with a scheme to withhold money from authors by saying a deal is not a deal until the customer actually reads the book. Note that Amazon gets the KU subscription payment up front, without the book having to be read
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There is no financial difference to Amazon one way or another. The same amount of KU money gets divided up whatever the formula is, all that changes is which authors get more or less.
The same is true of Kobo's system, which uses minutes read rather than pages read, but is otherwise similar.