This is to address people gaming the old system by turning in 10-30 page books of barely readable garbage. Under that system authors were paid ~$1.30 per book each time the reader passed the minimum 10% book length.
This encouraged a flight to short, low quality books. This new plan should wash out low quality work as it's no longer profitable to publish pamphlets with great titles and near Markov-chain levels of nonsense.
I think they will go for something like ( price_of_the_book)/(no_of_pages) for a single page. So it should not be a problem though.
Historically I think, may be, some of the 19 century books like Charles Dickens The Great Expectation may suffer from the problem you mention. These books used to be published like periodicals like a single chapter would be released each week(like soap). It made sense to lengthen them for financial benefit.
I am not sure, kind of anecdotal, but I think lot of people don't read or finish lot of books.
Despite the unfortunate name, that book presents some interesting empirical work. The theoretical side less so. The original "Capital" is nonsense. It's very interesting to me that presenting an incoherent argument, and insisting that anyone who doesn't understand it is ignorant, is a highly successful debating tactic.
>It's very interesting to me that presenting an incoherent argument, and insisting that anyone who doesn't understand it is ignorant, is a highly successful debating tactic.
This is why an awful lot of economics papers use very complex math. It's a way of intimidating critics.
For many of these papers, while the math is usually not exactly wrong, one quick glance at the unrealistic assumptions at the beginning of the paper is enough to invalidate the entire thing.
Since these papers are often used as a pretext to justify economic policy, this is a not unimportant part of how your wages, spending power and wealth is determined.
It takes way too long for the article to note that this only applies to books enrolled in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited program, which allows readers unlimited access to opted-in books for $9.99/month.
Books regularly published through KDP are unaffected.
When you read part of an ebook, set it aside, and come back, you want it to remember what page you were on. You also want this to work if you switch between devices. It is technically difficult to make this feature work without letting Amazon also know what page you're on.
But they don't only sync page numbers, but also written annotations (and bookmarks and highlights).
And regarding battery life, even a CPU much weaker than the one used by the original Kindle can encrypt at 1MB/s, so encrypting a couple of KB is absolutely negligible.
See? Random people declaring something acceptable or unacceptable without justification isn't particularly helpful. If you want to explain why you find it unacceptable, that might actually be interesting to someone.
I don't mind Amazon knowing how far into a book I've read, if it allows them to better compensate the authors of quality books and helps them penalize the authors gaming the system. However, if you want to keep your reading habits private, I can sympathize with that. An opt-in/opt-out option might be a good compromise in this case.
They also record the amount of time spent on each page and use that to predict the total reading time remaining.
Privacy issues aside, there are a number of really amazing tools Amazon could provide authors/editors/publishers if they were willing to share this data with them. The ability to pinpoint where readers either skip ahead or pick up the pace would offer editors a remarkable glimpse inside how readers approach a given story. It'd be even more useful if those insights could then be applied to help with editing unpublished manuscripts in the future. Compared to the present, where editors are forced to make what are often judgment calls on plotting, having hard data to look at would be a remarkable benefit.
They already know what books you're reading (because most of them have been purchased through amazon), and you're worried about them knowing what page you're on?
I am worried that an action as unimportant, intimate and personal as the turn of a page in a book, which previously required no expenditure of mental energy whatever, suddenly becomes an action with potentially global consequences. A passive action - reading something - becomes an active action (causing money to be sent to the author). I feel this is a fundamental change in the nature of the interaction.
I currently publish several books of a legal nature on Amazon, both in print and ebooks. I'd say my print book sales to ebook sales are 10:1 ratio in favor of print books.
That is interesting. When I read technical manuals I prefer them in print, when I read for pleasure (lately) I have been reading digital. I am not sure if this is conditioning from college or something else, but my experience is in line with your comment.
I think the per page strategy is way too arbitrary. What is a page exactly? A unit of measurement of text? How big is a page? What font must you use. What about technical books and books with pictures and diagrams? If we invented modern electronics before books we wouldn't care about pages.
Measuring time spent would be a lot more useful and harder to game. What if the book is dense with so much good information that I feel the need to read slower or reread a paragraph?
Technically this is probably based on Kindle's location measurement, rather than physical pages. Locations allow them to sync where you are across vastly different devices without worrying about the fact that one may be a mobile with a huge font size showing three words a page, and the other might be a desktop reader with a tiny font.
The pages will almost certainly be based on word count. I believe the standard is 150 words/page.
Word count is probably the best measure to base this on, because time spent reading is totally arbitrary and depends on external variables, like how fast a reader the buyer is, how distracted they are while reading, and how difficult the text is. Personally, I'd think it makes more sense to pay us per 1000 words of text read, but if they want to call 250 words of text a page, that essentially accomplishes the same thing.
This encouraged a flight to short, low quality books. This new plan should wash out low quality work as it's no longer profitable to publish pamphlets with great titles and near Markov-chain levels of nonsense.