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Originally Posted by Quoth
I agree.
Also Amazon decides the pot and decided the system, not authors or publishers. They could do a different system which would not snoop on readers, but they'd have to pay more. They should have to pay for rights per simultaneous loan and a small royalty per borrow, whether read or not.
The present system benefits the retailer and invades privacy and penalises authors compared to UK & Ireland libraries.
It's abuse of their monopoly position.
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Sadly, if they did not snoop, an author could (and have in the past) very easily game the system. Put a book in KU and since your amigos don't have to actually read the book, get the same payment per loan as an author who is actually publishing books are being read.
One story from years back mentioned one author who published short stories that were utter garbage and managed to make a good living from KU for months before the algorithms caught up with his network of cybernetic buddies. So we get the present system where Amazon records and analyzes page turns just in case a "reader" is flipping 300 pages per minute, or spending the same time on every page in the book.
Going by several reports, even that is not sufficient since the bot programmers are getting better and Amazon is pretty much limited to being reactive.