Quote:
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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Amazon has tried multiple ways of determining Kindle Unlimited payouts and the obvious ones turn out to have negative consequences.
If the payout is a fixed amount per book then publishers are incentivized to publish only short works and to break up longer ones into a series with as few pages as possible in each one.
If the payout is based on the size of book and paid at borrow then unscrupulous publishers put out books with minimal content padded with many pages of junk.
If the payout is based on the furthest page read then publishers put the good content at the end with a link at the beginning to jump to it.
Even the current system based on actual pages read has been gamed. Amazon's technique for determining page reads is somewhat complicated in order to work around other scams that have been tried.
(Edit: Ninja'd)