Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
You pay the same amount of money to Amazon for a KU subscription whether you read the books you rent on a Kindle or a Kobo. Is this not correct? The same goes for using Download and Transfer and side loading a KU book to your Kindle that is permanently in airplane mode (you can no longer do this with the recent Amazon changes, but you certainly could for many years).
So how is the customer cheating authors of their payment? If anything, someone may argue the point that Amazon is cheating the authors (but evidently with the authors permission - via the contract the probably signed with Amazon). How do you make the argument that the customer is the one doing the cheating? The customer has paid all required money to Amazon. In advance. Amazon is the one who made the decision to not give the authors their share of the money collected in some circumstances. And the authors have accepted this by willingly going under contract (whatever the legal definition is) with Amazon. What logic or legal principle are you using to say the customer is cheating?
I agree that the authors may not be getting paid. But that is not the issue. The issue is whether the customer is the cause of this, or the contract between Amazon/author is the cause of this. I say, "It is not the customer". And I base what I say on the fact that the customer has already paid the required money for their KU subscription. Ethically, part of that payment should go to the authors. If it doesn't, that's not the customers fault.
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When you sign up for Kindle Unlimited, you're paying Amazon to borrow books. When you remove the DRM or in the case where you used to be able to download & transfer to a Kindle that's permanently in airplane mode, you're not borrowing.
The current way that Amazon pays the authors resulted from previous methods getting gamed.