Quote:
Originally Posted by Sil_liS
A page of ads for every page of the book is too much. But saying that you pay for the advertisements is also strange. You pay for the story, not for each page of text.
|
In the case of the bloated ebooks, you're being misled about how much story you're paying for.
I'm willing to pay $4 on impulse for an 80,000 word novel. Sometimes, for a 50,000 word novel. I'm not willing to pay $4 on impulse for a 35,000 word novella and three 10,000 word excerpts from other novels, and all that does is convince me not to buy from that publisher/indie author again.
I suspect that, if people complained to Amazon, they could get the books yanked under their "bad user experience" rule, which covers spam books and books with misleading titles. (Not things like, "it said 'Murder by Memory' and I thought it was a psychic powers story and instead it was about repressed memories of a serial killer." Rather, things like "title was 'Murder by Memory' and it was a collection of Wikipedia articles beginning with 'M'.")
Advertising 150 pages of book, or 265kb of ebook, and half of that is advertisements, is misleading the customers. The easy way around that is to include the main story's word count in the description.