Kindle Unlimited is it worth it?

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by frahse

How is it "unread" with the author not getting paid if it is DeDRMed? Won't that process mark it as "read?"

No, it won't. The process is invisible to Amazon.

[barryem]

I read sometime back that Kindle Unlimited pays authors after a certain amount of the book has been read, or maybe it was they pay for the number of pages that have been read. I don't remember exactly and what I read might be out of date now anyway.

I think the question comes down to whether running the book through Alf would be seen as reading by Amazon. I doubt if it would.

That, to me, isn't the real issue though. If I rent a book and keep a copy for myself, maybe they get cheated and maybe they don't. The issue isn't who loses it's that I've tried to cheat them.

I'll buy a book and remove DRM happily. I've bought the book. That the TOS says I haven't doesn't really matter. I know that I have and they know it too even if they have legalese that says otherwise in case I abuse the system. I don't abuse it so the issue is moot. I've contacted Amazon about that and they agree, by the way. I often send my Alf'd books back as docs so I can read them on my Kindle and not have to worry about having it on too many devices. I've told Amazon I'm doing that because I don't want to hurt my relationship with them and they see no issue.

I don't have KU but if I did I wouldn't make copies of those books. I do get a Prime lending book every now and then and I've never copied one of them.

Barry

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by barryem

I read sometime back that Kindle Unlimited pays authors after a certain amount of the book has been read, or maybe it was they pay for the number of pages that have been read. I don't remember exactly and what I read might be out of date now anyway.

I think the question comes down to whether running the book through Alf would be seen as reading by Amazon. I doubt if it would.

That, to me, isn't the real issue though. If I rent a book and keep a copy for myself, maybe they get cheated and maybe they don't. The issue isn't who loses it's that I've tried to cheat them.

I'll buy a book and remove DRM happily. I've bought the book. That the TOS says I haven't doesn't really matter. I know that I have and they know it too even if they have legalese that says otherwise in case I abuse the system. I don't abuse it so the issue is moot. I've contacted Amazon about that and they agree, by the way. I often send my Alf'd books back as docs so I can read them on my Kindle and not have to worry about having it on too many devices. I've told Amazon I'm doing that because I don't want to hurt my relationship with them and they see no issue.

I don't have KU but if I did I wouldn't make copies of those books. I do get a Prime lending book every now and then and I've never copied one of them.

Barry

They used to pay when 10% was read. Too many short short short works. What is 10% of 10 pages? So authors of all lengths were getting the same amount of money.
It led to a ton and a half of crap in KU and people were not signing up because you couldn't find a book amongst the canned meat.

Now they pay something like $.005 a page or slightly less.
So now a ten page book will net you 5 cents.

[jhowell]

It has been a while, but at one time they used the highest page number reached as the number of pages read. Scammers produced books with a link to the end near the beginning with text that asked the reader to click on it. The pages skipped over were counted as read.

I believe that they fixed this to use an actual pages read count, but I am not really sure.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by jhowell

It has been a while, but at one time they used the highest page number reached as the number of pages read. Scammers produced books with a link to the end near the beginning with text that asked the reader to click on it. The pages skipped over were counted as read.

I believe that they fixed this to use an actual pages read count, but I am not really sure.

This is why now KU books must have the TOC in the front.

Oh and they fixed the link problem by throwing those books out of KU.

[frahse]

I hear what you guys are saying. Seems kind of dumb of Amazon. Essentially asking to be cheated. I hope Bezos rocket ships are programmed better.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by frahse

I hear what you guys are saying. Seems kind of dumb of Amazon. Essentially asking to be cheated. I hope Bezos rocket ships are programmed better.

Basing the reading statistics for KU on information they already had (highest page read) makes logical sense. To implement a better tracking system would have required them to update the firmware for all models of Kindle and also all of the reading apps for all platforms. They also would have had to block older Kindle models and older apps from using KU. That would have been a problem for customers.

In any case, it is the authors who are cheated. Amazon makes money either way.

[Jo69]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

You don't join permanently. It is on a month to month basis.
You sign up and if you like it, they will bill you every month after the free trial. If you don't see a use, cancel before the free trial expires. You can always rejoin later but I think they limit you to one free trial.

Thanks for that. So far its all good.
But there are lots of books that I want that are not in unlimited. Although read quite a few that are so far.
Thanks for all the helpful replies.

[frahse]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Basing the reading statistics for KU on information they already had (highest page read) makes logical sense. To implement a better tracking system would have required them to update the firmware for all models of Kindle and also all of the reading apps for all platforms. They also would have had to block older Kindle models and older apps from using KU. That would have been a problem for customers.

In any case, it is the authors who are cheated. Amazon makes money either way.

What you say is true, but a remedy need not include updating anything.

Amazon could simply limit the number "lent" per month or week. Amazon would then decide what to do in the future after accessing their more voracious readers' habits and proclivities.

There might not really be a problem, just a few show-offs.

[frahse]

-- duplicate. sorry.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by frahse

What you say is true, but a remedy need not include updating anything.

Amazon could simply limit the number "lent" per month or week. Amazon would then decide what to do in the future after accessing their more voracious readers' habits and proclivities.

There might not really be a problem, just a few show-offs.

Well, it wouldn't be"Unlimited" if they capped the number of books, would it?

The problem wasn't the readers, but rather the scammer "publishers".
The way KU works is that every month Amazon sets up a payout pool that is divided by the number of pages read to set the payout for the month. So the scammers weren't stealing from Amazon but from the authors. The KU pool grows month to month by a few percentage points and the payout runs (for the US) in the 0.42 to 0.45 cent range per virtual page read. It may seem very low but in practice it delivers full-read payouts in the range of roughly 80-120 percent of sale payout. It depends on the length and price of the title.
The first thing is the scammers, even at peak, weren't making millions per month. The pool size is on the scale of ten million so a big scam would drop the monthly payout a lot.
Second, KU pagereads tend to be proportional to sales. On average a good book will generate 40% of its earnings from reads and 60% from sales. Some lesser titles generate more on KU than in total sales but it takes a poor book to come even close to 100% pageread revenue. And if that high ratio is tied to close to 100% completion...
Flag time!
KU is avery strange and interesting beast. Very data dependent while generating tons of priceless data on the side. The reader behavior and title performance data is so valuable that Amazon could conceivably be paying out all the subscription revenue, over $200M a year, and still be ahead. Doubtful but not impossible.
With all the data gathering they can flag al sorts of oddities. And the penalties are automatic expulsion, blacklisting, and forfeiture of all account revenue. Amazon may not be losing money but they hate when their data mining is polluted.
So yes there is scamming but not as much as you might hear online.
That scale of scam would be noticed in hours or days.

So there is no need to impact readers.
Especially since caps would upset the balance of the system.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Well, it wouldn't be"Unlimited" if they capped the number of books, would it?

The problem wasn't the readers, but rather the scammer "publishers".
The way KU works is that every month Amazon sets up a payout pool that is divided by the number of pages read to set the payout for the month. So the scammers weren't stealing from Amazon but from the authors. The KU pool grows month to month by a few percentage points and the payout runs (for the US) in the 0.42 to 0.45 cent range per virtual page read. It may seem very low but in practice it delivers full-read payouts in the range of roughly 80-120 percent of sale payout. It depends on the length and price of the title.
The first thing is the scammers, even at peak, weren't making millions per month. The pool size is on the scale of ten million so a big scam would drop the monthly payout a lot.
Second, KU pagereads tend to be proportional to sales. On average a good book will generate 40% of its earnings from reads and 60% from sales. Some lesser titles generate more on KU than in total sales but it takes a poor book to come even close to 100% pageread revenue. And if that high ratio is tied to close to 100% completion...
Flag time!
KU is avery strange and interesting beast. Very data dependent while generating tons of priceless data on the side. The reader behavior and title performance data is so valuable that Amazon could conceivably be paying out all the subscription revenue, over $200M a year, and still be ahead. Doubtful but not impossible.
With all the data gathering they can flag al sorts of oddities. And the penalties are automatic expulsion, blacklisting, and forfeiture of all account revenue. Amazon may not be losing money but they hate when their data mining is polluted.
So yes there is scamming but not as much as you might hear online.
That scale of scam would be noticed in hours or days.

So there is no need to impact readers.
Especially since caps would upset the balance of the system.

I haven't seen much lately on it, but yes Amazon does close the loopholes when they spot them.
There isn't near as much sludge in KU as there was when it was something like $2-3 per book read. Once they changed the pay scale, the better authors got in it because they could make more money.

[frahse]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Well, it wouldn't be"Unlimited" if they capped the number of books, would it?

The problem wasn't the readers, but rather the scammer "publishers".
The way KU works is that every month Amazon sets up a payout pool that is divided by the number of pages read to set the payout for the month. So the scammers weren't stealing from Amazon but from the authors. The KU pool grows month to month by a few percentage points and the payout runs (for the US) in the 0.42 to 0.45 cent range per virtual page read. It may seem very low but in practice it delivers full-read payouts in the range of roughly 80-120 percent of sale payout. It depends on the length and price of the title.
The first thing is the scammers, even at peak, weren't making millions per month. The pool size is on the scale of ten million so a big scam would drop the monthly payout a lot.
Second, KU pagereads tend to be proportional to sales. On average a good book will generate 40% of its earnings from reads and 60% from sales. Some lesser titles generate more on KU than in total sales but it takes a poor book to come even close to 100% pageread revenue. And if that high ratio is tied to close to 100% completion...
Flag time!
KU is avery strange and interesting beast. Very data dependent while generating tons of priceless data on the side. The reader behavior and title performance data is so valuable that Amazon could conceivably be paying out all the subscription revenue, over $200M a year, and still be ahead. Doubtful but not impossible.
With all the data gathering they can flag al sorts of oddities. And the penalties are automatic expulsion, blacklisting, and forfeiture of all account revenue. Amazon may not be losing money but they hate when their data mining is polluted.
So yes there is scamming but not as much as you might hear online.
That scale of scam would be noticed in hours or days.

So there is no need to impact readers.
Especially since caps would upset the balance of the system.

What you say mostly stands on it own merits, but still looking at the outlier users (what? 50 books a month?, 100?, 1000?, ...) would tell us a lot about whether the term unlimited needs an asterisk (unlimited*) on it or not.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by frahse

What you say mostly stands on it own merits, but still looking at the outlier users (what? 50 books a month?, 100?, 1000?, ...) would tell us a lot about whether the term unlimited needs an asterisk (unlimited*) on it or not.

Well, it has an asterisk. Two of them.
You can only read as much as your eyeballs can handle and you can only download ten books at a time.

One under-appreciated feature of KU is that a subscriber can check out any book that catches their fancy, read as far as they enjoy it and ditch it when they don't and it doesn't cost them anything. Risk free discovery.
You don't have to read 30 books a month for KU to be worth the cost.

Amazon doesn't care how much any one person reads because the 50-100 book-a-month outliers will be a tiny fraction of the 1-2M subscribers, whereas the 3-5 book a month readers are legion. Only Amazon knows for real but by all indications the average full-book equivalents read by subsctibers is closer to 4 than 10 and nowhere near 100.

[Jo69]

I have been happy so far with my first month of kindle unlimited.
Was wondering though if you know if it is possible to keep joining and re joining?
As though I find it useful I have a large wish list of books that are not in unlimited I also want to buy in between times.