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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

This scam isn't victimless.

First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit real hard-working authors who supply a product people want.

Secondly, Amazon react by trying to engineer algorithmic anti-scam measures, which end up catching the aforementioned hard-working authors instead of the scammers. For example:

http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/2016/03/amazon-may-they-cho...

(TLDR: Walter Jon Williams is a respected author, who has been bringing out his backlist of out-of-print novels as ebooks. Amazon's anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he'd released them and run a marketing campaign -- for the crime of having a table of contents at the end of the books. Because that was easier to automate than, say, collecting actual pages-viewed metrics as a basis for payment instead of just checking the last-page-bookmarked.)

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> First, it depletes the pot awaiting actual no-shit real hard-working authors who supply a product people want.

It doesn't just deplete the pot, by driving the per-page price down, it discourages legitimate writers from making their books available via Kindle Unlimited.. which makes the overall program less attractive to customers.

Amazon needs to address this one before it enters the death spiral stage..

I personally think the whole Kindle Unlimited project is shit anyway and authors shouldn't bother using it. It's like Last.fm, Spotify, Rhapsody, etc. For non-popular artists/authors, it gets their material out there and they get a minimal payout. But compared to a system with legitimate sales, it pays content producers garbage!

I don't buy music from iTunes/Amazon because they take ~30% of the sales cost, which is insane! Bandcamp only takes 15% (10% if you form an independent label with other artists and produce a volume of sales).

> But compared to a system with legitimate sales, it pays content producers garbage!

I imagine that it depends quite a bit on whether you have marketing in place to promote your work, and your own fan base. That marketing is generally provided by publisher (AFAIK), and isn't free.

I suspect there's a spectrum, and at the low end KU is vastly superior to a traditional publisher for your average author, and at the high end it's vastly inferior. Would you rather have 2,000 x $5.99, or 20,000 x $1.50? Or maybe you did some marketing, so it's 6,000 x $5.99 - $X, where $X is somewhere between $3k and $10k?

Here's one author's breakdown[1], which is interesting reading.

1: http://noorosha.com/kindleunlimited/

> That marketing is generally provided by publisher

Publisher marketing is minimal to none these days. Also, due to cluelessness, the marketing you do get is often not very useful.

I was just at a book marketing seminar yesterday and the speaker mentioned that her publisher did Facebook ads for her...which were known to be ineffective for her genre and demographic, but required by the publisher's guidelines.

So the author had to pick up the slack and take matters into her own hands (and pockets).

> Publisher marketing is minimal to none these days.

Sometimes true, sometimes false -- depends on publisher (and often on internal politics). What they want to push gets money thrown at it, whether or not it's productive: or sometimes extraneous shit happens. (I have a personal example in mind but I do not feel able to write about until after June 2018, at which time I will no longer be with the publisher in question ...)

> Also, due to cluelessness, the marketing you do get is often not very useful.

To some extent this is down to the author. If you actually roll up your sleeves and suggest some affordable and productive targets for marketing spend, the marketing manager in charge of your book will love you to bits because you just made their job a whole lot simpler.

Again: many authors seem content to leave it in the hands of their publisher's marketing department, who are overworked and under constant budgetary pressure. And because they're overworked they don't have time to research/learn new tricks. (I recently saw a proposed marketing plan for a book of mine scheduled for 2018. It was great ... just like the one they ran in 2008, only with a Reddit AmA bolted on top. Yeah, right.)

Hey thanks for the perspective. I've been going through your CMAP series over the past few days...it's incredibly helpful!

Do you realise just how much better a deal 30% is compared to buying a CD from a record store? For any muso who hasn't already sold their soul/rights to a major label (and who's not in Bono's infinitely privileged and connected kind of position), iTunes sales are a fabulous deal.

You're still right though, KU is more comparable to Spotify, where songs are effectively "worthless", but artists consider it worthwhile to give away their music there for discoverability - Zöe Keating used to publish year;y blog posts as raw data as spreadsheets showing how (litte) the variou streaming services (who didn't prohibit her contractually from doing so) paid.

Amazon apparently won't care until it affects their bottom line and so far it appears not to.

Clearly they built the simplest possible model (pay based on the last page seen) and fixing it is too much work for the little they make. KU is just another bullet point (look here, we have unlimited books) and the money is immaterial so investing as little as possible makes business sense. Why anyone would use KU knowing is is beyond my understanding.

Ultimately their system depends on reports from end user devices to determine how much a book was read, and that will always be vulnerable to manipulation.

The first order fix would be to simply having the Kindle use its internal timer to keep track of how long each book was read (with sanity checks on the server side to make sure a Kindle is not reporting more hours read than is possible) and use that as the metric to pay authors (by the hour).

The hackers will create thousands of virtual Kindles and have them report fake times, but that's a much higher hurdle than just flipping to the end of the book and hitting "sync". Amazon might also figure out ways to detect the fake "Kindles".

There are some other things Amazon can do to mitigate the problem. They can require a book to be published for at least a full month before paying out. This will give it time for normal people to detect the fraud and report it, albeit at the cost of making the indie authors starve for an extra month.

Amazon could also hire a real person who's job is to scour all newly published titles for frauds. How many titles are published every day? Is it more than a person could spot check?

Based on that article having your table of contents at the end of the book is probably trying to scam more pages. Obviously Amazon needs to fix their page accounting system but taking advantage of it in this way is pretty awful and his books should be removed until they are fixed.

For what it's worth, it used to be pretty standard to put the ToC at the back of the book when making epub and mobi files.

We did it at Leanpub, and I'm pretty sure we were just following what the Prags and (if I remember correctly) O'Reilly were doing.

The reason was that opening an epub and flipping through a long ToC before you get to the book is really annoying. There is a way to set the "starting page" in epubs, but many ebook readers ignored this at the time and just opened at the title-page, so putting the ToC at the end was just a better reader experience.

Now that most e-readers use the start-page setting properly, ToCs are mostly at the beginning of ebooks.

I never knew this, thanks for the insight and history behind this approach.

I really don't think he was trying to scam 1 more page read in books that probably number at least 300 pages...

It's not about the number of pages—if the ToC was moved to the beginning, the total count would be the same—it's about having people skip to the last page to look at the ToC even if they don't plan to finish the book.

Why would people skip to the last page to look at ToC of a novel? He put it there so people don't have to look at it.

Read the article on how the scam works.

In WJW's case it's based on traditional aesthetics: he writes novels, he doesn't want to omit the ToC completely but he expects readers to want to start with the text itself rather than wading through pages of ToCs.

(Trust me on this: I've known him in meatspace for about 15 years and he's simply not technically-minded enough to be trying to game the system: he's a novelist, not a programmer.)

For extra fun: table-of-contents at the end is the convention for French books.

Given that Kindle Unlimited is available in France (according to http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...), I wonder what they do...

That's get little to do with this issue and more to do with Amazon insisting of formatting rules being met.

Especially as none of Walter Jon Williams books seem to be in kindle unlimited

It sure sounds like a great way to get people to turn to the way back of the book though too..

As someone with a side project doing formatting ( www.liberwriter.com ) I can confirm that the ToC is supposed to be near the front.

You can downvote all you want, but it's right there in Amazon's guidelines:

https://kindlegen.s3.amazonaws.com/AmazonKindlePublishingGui...

"Place the HTML TOC towards the beginning of the book and not at the end of the book. "

> Amazon's anti-scam measure yanked all his books off sale -- right after he'd released them and run a marketing campaign

That part probably seems far more relevant as an Amazon customer than it does to me as an Amazon employee. It'd be like saying "I got a parking ticket the day after I filed my tax return."

It's a shitty coincidence, but only that.

It's not necessarily cause-and-effect, but it shows how you can get deleted by an algorithm at the worst possible time.

It also shows how if you're submitting your work to an algorithm, following the submission guidelines is a must.

If it was submitted according to the publishing guidelines, then removed, we could have this conversation.

It's really no different than file sharing and the music industry (and how it devalued mp3s and music to $0 over the last decade).

The technology is now just coming around to the book industry.

I don't really see the similarity. With this Kindle scam, the scammers are taking money and directly putting it into their pockets. No one is discovering new content, no one is sharing content, no one is being entertained.

With file sharing, no the sharers make no money (except websites that show ads), and people discover new content that they enjoy.

People may be enjoying new content, at the expense of devaluing the entire industry.

After a decade of music sharing, the next generation grew up just expecting music to be free. This is exactly what many of us were saying and many doing the sharing said it wouldn't happen.

There were even alleged studies that claimed file sharing would increase artist profits. The proof is here and this never happened.

The problem is two-fold: You have amazon devaluing ebooks value through their service and the scammers devaluing it even further.

We are in a transitional period on the Internet, which may eventually give big corporations everything and leave everyone else with the scraps if we continue handing everything over on a silver platter.

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