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In summary - Amazon pays all Kindle Unlimited authors out of a shared pot, the size of your share determined by the metric of "pages read" (and you thought your
by feintruled 11y ago
In summary - Amazon pays all Kindle Unlimited authors out of a shared pot, the size of your share determined by the metric of "pages read" (and you thought your Kindle just reported that back for syncing purposes!). Enter the scammers - who make 3000 page fake books, page one containing an enticing link to the final page. This counts as having read the whole book!
- enraged_camel 11y agoWow! That's some incredible gross incompetence on part of the people at Amazon who designed this system, and those who QA'd it.
- ethbro 11y agoThat's the difference between people designing a system against a malicious adversary and a user. Nowadays, if it involves money, for godsakes please assume the former.
- chaosfox 11y agothe system is still bad even without a malicious party, as said in the article, if the user go back to page 1 after reading the book the system will count the book as unread and the author will not get paid.
- DanHulton 11y agoPretty sure that's not true. They sync "furthest page read" not "last page read".
- morley 11y agoHow would you have fixed it? Assuming you implement the obvious thing -- tracking each page of a book the user has opened -- (a) How could you reliably track this if the user always keeps their Kindle on airplane mode? (b) How could you track this accurately if the user reads a few hundred pages in the subway, where there's no Internet service? (c) How could you distinguish that between someone who hopped around a book in that same time period? (d) If Kindles don't already track page views this way, how do you update the software on all Kindles to start tracking this way? When do you switch your billing script to track purchases like that? (e) If you're QAing a Kindle and you spot this loophole, how do you do all these fixes? How long are you willing to keep the software from shipping? How certain are you that your theoretical solution is better than what's already shipped? Product development is hard, and it makes me angry when people handwave it as "gross incompetence" from a position of ignorance.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoWe run a small microsite service for designers and once enabled single page view tracking metrics - we had at the time very few customers and yet manage to smash trough our 50k keen.io event allowance in a single day. Can't imagine it on sonething where books have hundred pages and users running in the million
- phonon 11y agoYou don't think amazon can handle a few GB of log files every day for the entire kindle unlimited service? Really? Worst case you do some sampling.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoI'm sure they can do, they bill themselves at a different price
- coldtea 11y agoIt's not even about the billing. Companies 1/1000 the size of Amazon can afford it.
- LoSboccacc 11y agoyou mean 10 million a year revenue company? I wish we'd be there.
- coldtea 11y agoYep. VC funded startups with 5-10 million in funding can handle GB per day log processing.
- joeld42 11y agoYou can do the aggregation locally on the device. You wouldn't want to send every page view as an immediate event, just send the aggregates every 15 minutes or at the start or end of each session.
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI'm surprised "start read" times and "stopped read time" and "actual pages read" isn't taken into account in the whole process. If an entire 1000+ page book is read within less than 5 minutes, something is wrong. I don't care how fast of a reader you are, my classic Kindle wouldn't be able to process that many pages in under 5 minutes anyway.
- pareci 11y agoIs "incredible gross incompetence" good or bad? I have problems judging people, so need help.
- malloreon 11y agoincompetence is bad. gross incompetence is bad on a widespread and surprising scale. incredible gross incompetence is shockingly bad on a widespread and surprising scale. "Incredible" doesn't mean good, by definition - it means unbelievable.
- pareci 11y agoWhy is incompetence bad? I have no ego and don't have a way of judging things like this. I think I am unusual in not having an ego. I can't assert that anything is "bad" or "good", including incompetence. I understand "incredible" here. I also understand "gross", although "surprising" is a bit difficult. I have no ego, so no reference of what is surprising. For those with egos, surprising is usually in reference to the ego. For example, a tebibyte of RAM is surprising to an OSX programmer. A tebibyte of RAM is not surprising to someone working on seismic simulations for oil extraction.
- gallopingcomp 11y agoI do see your point. But I think you are being too pedantic... By saying it's incompetence and "bad", the poster probably meant that the people at Amazon aren't doing a great job (in achieving whatever goals they want to achieve or we customers want them to achieve, in this case keeping the scammers out). Maybe the poster is just frustrated with Amazon not doing its job. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with egos in the sense that the people at Amazon are pathetic idiots that that we should scoff at or that we can indulge in a sense of superiority. It's simply about solving a problem. Also, I don't think you were fully correct in saying that surprising is usually in reference to the ego. I think it's simply in reference to what you've seen before, what you are used to seeing, what you expect to see or would like to see. It's not necessarily ego-related. But yeah, having an open mind and not being limited by what you've seen is important. But I digress.