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Originally Posted by Hitch
Yes, sideways images of text pages, over and over and over.
Yes, AFAIK, this is very different from what we've seen previously.
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Interesting.
Can you point to a few places reporting/discussing this? I'd love to read about this latest "trend".
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
(major snippages, cuz, it's Tex.)
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Heh, I was going to go in more detail, but I skimmed through the rest of my post and thought it was decently sized already!
But since you insist:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tex2002ans
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
What Amazon REALLY needs to do (run, this is a hot-button topic with me) is charge a minimal upload fee, say, $10 or $25 [...]. That would put a cold stop to a lot of this piracy nonsense, of all kinds.
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No.
See Google Play (apps) + Steam (video games). |
Why not?
[...]
What's Google play (apps) and Stream (video games) got to do with upload fees? |
Both markets parallel the Amazon ebook situation.
They've applied those policies for years, and things are still a disaster.
Steam currently has a $100 per submission fee, recoupable after $1000 in sales.
Google Play has a one-time $25 developer fee. (Apple has a $99 per year fee.)
* * *
Steam
Pre-2012, Steam sold video games purely from established publishers.
In 2012, Valve introduced "Steam Greenlight".
This expanded Steam's store to massive amounts of indie titles. It was an enormous boon in quantity, but the quality was still there.
The Greenlight system allowed games to be voted on. Once a title reached high enough votes/ratings (1000 votes?), the games were vetted by Valve, then let into the main Steam storefront.
This also brought about the boon of "Early Access" games:
Similar to books, games go through the same stages (Alpha -> Beta -> Official Release).
Pre-2012, games would only be sold when they were done/completed.
Post-2012 though, early access made games pre-purchasable during the Alpha/Beta stages. (Remember: crowdsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon + was also booming.)
In 2017, Steam Direct was conceived.
The previous voting/vetting system of Greenlight was thrown away, and now the entire storefront became a large free-for-all.
This opened the floodgates to the absolute avalanche of dross.
(See similar parallels?
)
Note: Xbox (Microsoft) + Playstation (Sony) have much stricter/steeper fees—low initially, but I think it balloons up to ~$5000 with mandatory translation/age-ratings, plus they charge enormous per-patch fees—but even they've been getting similar (although much smaller scale) problems these past few console generations.
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Google Play
We all know about that disaster:
Scumbags and scams, microtransactions and ads through the roof.
Google is constantly scanning/fingerprinting apps, but the absolute scale of this is insane, and too many legitimate developers also get caught in the crosshairs of Google's bots.
(And the absolute worst thing about Google is you can't get in touch with an actual human. If you wrongly get snipped, you usually have to create an enormous hubbub on social media and hope you get enough attention to get your app/account reinstated.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Even an upload fee that's paid back, let's say, by royalties so that after XXX period of time, the publisher hasn't paid it. It's a gatekeeping method, [...], but I genuinely don't see a better way.
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Downranking/Purging the crap. Upranking the legitimate.
Better fingerprinting.
Keeping an eye out for the latest "tricks" like your latest sideways images... or the ol' Kindle Unlimited "count the entire book as read by jumping to the end TOCs" combined with the "copy and paste multiple books in one", etc.
Anyway, similar to fighting spam/viruses, both sides are constantly on the lookout for the latest scams, and are always updating their methods.
It's a multi-variate problem.
But an upload fee? I don't believe it's as effective as other methods + there are many other factors that could be used. But what do I know?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
"Democratizing" publishing so that any Tom Dick or Harriet can publish hasn't really resulting in millions of best-selling novels arriving full-blown and ready to rock, like Pegasus from the head of Medusa, now, has it?
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I don't know. The internet is a pretty cool place.
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Anyway, back to KFX-land.
Thanks for all the research, jhowell.
Just last night, I was ranting and raving and bringing a friend up to speed about this.
And I agree with your long-term/bigger-picture assessments of the KFX format (being pushed as DRM + stronger Amazon control over their ebooks).