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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
by technofiend 11y ago
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.
- foobarqux 11y agoWhat about something like "Capital in the 21st Century"?
- JesperRavn 11y agoDespite 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.
- crdoconnor 11y ago>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.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoYou prefer Reinhart and Rogoff?
- akhatri_aus 11y agoWould this not encourage books to be larger with a lower density of content?
- __Joker 11y agoI 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.
- oldgun 11y agoHow about paying by the percentage of what the customer read?
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago$CLIFFHANGER_CHAPTER_ENDING
- yxhuvud 11y agoThat should be adjusting by itself though, since lower density of content lowers the want to continue reading.
- dlitz 11y agoRight, but it'll adjust to the point just above the "intolerably sparse" threshold.