Limited Kindle Unlimited

[GlenBarrington]

Originally Posted by issybird

When I had Prime, I had a hard time coming up with even one book a month to borrow through KOLL (identical to the KU library, AFAIK). It wasn't worth the effort.

I realize that I'm not the typical KU reader, but there's an awful lot of dross there.

Not identical, it has a much smaller universe of books available.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Mistyfarm

But lets just say that they pay authors per page view as has been suggested and that they really were actually dumb enough NOT to have algorized it to filter out spurious use; how would you calculate someone was just blitzing or scamming so Amazon could keep making the most money without losing it to real life fraudsters?

They are filtering out spurious use, that is why they have filtered out you.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have removed your page views from their payment stats.

[Mistyfarm]

Originally Posted by barryem

"Put a tiger in your tank".

Barry

Oh Bazz (as we would say here downunder)

I remember growing up with that one too buddy!

But mate, I gotta point out just a few of names you left off your list;
ENRON
Bernie Madhoff
& Lehman Brothers

........ happy to help out

(I double checked with Forbes)

[issybird]

Originally Posted by GlenBarrington

Not identical, it has a much smaller universe of books available.

Finish reading the thread before responding?

I'd also quibble with "much smaller" when KOLL has some 800,000 books and KU has about 1.4 million. At that point, it doesn't matter much. What does matter is if the only 100,000 KU books which are not Amazon exclusives are all, or mostly all, in KOLL. That I don't know, but I personally never ran across a book that wasn't in both.

[DrNefario]

Originally Posted by issybird

Finish reading the thread before responding?

I'd also quibble with "much smaller" when KOLL has some 800,000 books and KU has about 1.4 million. At that point, it doesn't matter much. What does matter is if the only 100,000 KU books which are not Amazon exclusives are all, or mostly all, in KOLL. That I don't know, but I personally never ran across a book that wasn't in both.

Likewise. The KU flag is now the only way you can tell if a book is likely to be in the KOLL. I used to see more difference when it was possible to identify them separately, but I wonder if it's still possible to be in one and not the other via KDP?

[Mistyfarm]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

They are filtering out spurious use, that is why they have filtered out you.

Well clutch your pearls with a surprised look on your face Muzza (not being offensive, we replace rr with zz and call redheads Bluey)..... just now added "The Want Makers: The world of advertising: how they make you buy" on KU and quickly looking at it I'd give it so far a;

"MobileRead's Mistyfarm rates this a 6/10"

but I need more time, I didn't know they'd let me back in just yet ...... they still haven't responded to my outstanding support tickets.

Originally Posted by murraypaul

I wouldn't be surprised if they have removed your page views from their payment stats.

I ............ don't know what that means ........

but they're still letting me in the ring and I'm sure the kids from Legal are taking notes

[haertig]

Were you planning on telling us how many books were involved, or not? It's hard to sympathize with a complaint against Amazon for refusing to say "how many", when you yourself won't say "how many" either. Since you have gotten people worried/interested in this invisible limit on book checkouts by posting this thread, it would be nice if you'd answer the question - the information would be useful for the rest of us.

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by haertig

Were you planning on telling us how many books were involved, or not? It's hard to sympathize with a complaint against Amazon for refusing to say "how many", when you yourself won't say "how many" either. Since you have gotten people worried/interested in this invisible limit on book checkouts by posting this thread, it would be nice if you'd answer the question - the information would be useful for the rest of us.

MistyFarm previously stated:

Actual number of books is not stated on my KU borrow page. Just a date sorted list of books marked returned and I need to scroll all the way down and manually count ……. happy to simply admit to x00 during the period of my researching.

[DiapDealer]

So 100 to 900? That certainly narrows it down.

[haertig]

Actual number of books is not stated on my KU borrow page. Just a date sorted list of books marked returned and I need to scroll all the way down and manually count ……. happy to simply admit to x00 during the period of my researching.

x00 = 100 or 900? That's a big range there.

General technique for quick counting: Hold mouse button down as you scroll down listing on webpage, thus highlighting all the lines. Copy-n-paste into a text file. Then (in Linux) use "wc -l filename" to count how many lines. In Windows or MacOS, I'm sure there is an equivalent method to easily get the line count of a file. And it's easy enough to adjust the final count if for example, one line from the webpage shows up as three lines in the text file (due to webpage formatting) - just divide the reported count by three in that case.

Nobody is asking for an exact, confirmed, certified and verified count. Just a reasonable approximation. If the mouse highlighting above results in the accidental capture of a few extra lines, or a few missed lines, I doubt it will effect the final count enough to matter.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by Mistyfarm

But lets just say that they pay authors per page view as has been suggested and that they really were actually dumb enough NOT to have algorized it to filter out spurious use; how would you calculate someone was just blitzing or scamming so Amazon could keep making the most money without losing it to real life fraudsters?

One way to calculate that is to see if a user is repeatedly blitzing through numerous books, which looks like what you got caught in.

It's not that you went through 300 books. it's that you went through 300 books in an hour and then did it again and did it again. Scammers do this as Kindle Unlimited pays out per page read. You can Google "Kindle Unlimited Click Farm" and find many articles about it.

It's just your bad luck that your legitimate behavior matches a well known scheme that Amazon is protecting against. So Darryl was right. It is a good and necessary anti-fraud measure.

[haertig]

I wonder why Amazon decided to pay "per page read"? It's inherently impossible for them to determine that. You'd think they would pay "per book downloaded" as that is not something open to interpretation. Sure, people might download a book and not read it. But who is Amazon to care?

Amazon could simply say, "We pay authors per book downloaded, up to a maximum of 30 books per month per user". A user could still download more books than that, but if they did, the excess over 30 wouldn't count towards author payments.

I dare say this would not mess with the vast majority of users. Yes, some people can and do read more than one book per day on a long term consistent basis, but I propose that they are probably few and far between.

Amazon could also name the service "Kindle Unleashed" instead of "Kindle Unlimited" and publish a monthly maximum number of books that can be downloaded. They already have a limit of 10 for "books at the same time", no reason they couldn't make a monthly maximum too.

There are plenty of solutions to the "fraudulent book clicker" problem - Amazon seems to have chosen the least understandable and most unenforceable one.

[jhowell]

There are problems with paying by the book downloaded. If you don’t take into account the size of the book then you encourage authors to split stories into separate books for each chapter. If you do take into account size then scammers will produce thousand page books with no real content.

Even with its problems, attempting to count pages actually read tends to weed out scams and is more fair to authors.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by haertig

There are plenty of solutions to the "fraudulent book clicker" problem - Amazon seems to have chosen the least understandable and most unenforceable one.

Oh, I don't know. Judging by how few reports there are out there where legitimate users are bumping this this unknown limit, I'd say your conclusion is quite debatable. I'd say it's all working reasonably well for the vast majority of subscribers/authors. *shrug*

[Mistyfarm]

Originally Posted by haertig

There are plenty of solutions to the "fraudulent book clicker" problem - Amazon seems to have chosen the least understandable and most unenforceable one.

Because they're still harvesting your clicks. You're right, there are plenty of solutions which they're probably using at another level to sieve it out not to mention at having shmucks like us giving them "free" feedback and programming suggestions in public forums! (Hyrum's probably giggling behind his hornrims)

I'm not trying to reverse engineer Amazon's business model so why would I be busy for days calculating and coding an issue they could solve with a simple answer they already know? But thanks for the hints if they were genuine helpful advice. (Zod's click farm link is helpful, I'll look at that later)

All I was getting to was that Amazon aren't upfront with the real details or honestly or in good faith providing "need to know" information to a customer....... ie full disclosure. You can't sell a dozen eggs and when the customer queries why there is only 10 in the carton and it takes a month of investigation AFTER the sale to find that "Oh we calculate in the metric system, we've decided that 10 is a metric dozen". Duh!

Now, it's nice for Amazon that a lot of you blokes (or blokettes) are rushing in to take bullets for them on this issue but let me pose this to the apologists; are you in favour of the principle Innocent until proven Guilty?