[Kuiper]

One of the selling points for Kindle is that if you switch devices partway through (e.g. switch from reading on your tablet to reading on your phone, or switch from reading the ebook to listening to the audiobook in your car), it remembers what page you're on, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

Amazon actively touts this "Whispersync" feature in their marketing. (From the Kindle product page: "With Whispersync, switch from Kindle to the Kindle app without losing your place (requires Wi-Fi).") One would presume that Amazon achieves this by tracking whenever readers tap the screen to advance to the next page. (And having a timestamp for that tap matters for resolving merge conflicts.)

Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read. (If a person reads the first 5 pages of your book and drops it, the author gets paid less than if they read the whole thing.) One of the things that Amazon has to deal with is fraud prevention, to detect when authors are finding ways to game metrics: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited...

[dhimes]

Also worth noting that in the case of Kindle Unlimited (Amazon's "Netflix for ebooks" program), authors get paid per page read.

I don't like this anyway. If I buy a movie from Amazon Prime and only watch part of it, do I get a partial refund? Seems like they are shafting authors.

[Kuiper]

Since you seem to have missed the point of my "Netflix for ebooks" analogy (which you quoted): Kindle Unlimited is a subscription service where users can pay $10/month for unlimited access to a catalog of books that authors have chosen to list under the KU program. (This is how subscription services like Netflix work from a consumer standpoint. The difference from the creator side is that authors get paid based on how much people read their books, whereas Netflix funds productions up front, and then uses viewer data to make decisions about which shows to renew.)

The money that people spend on $10/month KU subscriptions is used to pay authors based on which authors people spent the most time reading (or, more accurately, which books you read the most pages of). If I read 400 pages of book A, and 5 pages of book B, then author A gets paid more than author B. I think the reasoning behind this should be pretty intuitive and obvious. Since every KU subscriber only spends $10/mo regardless of how much they read, there is a fixed "pie" to distribute to authors, and it makes sense to divide the pie based on which authors contributed the most to the readers' use of the KU platform.

Readers don't get a "refund" for dropping a KU book 5% of the way through, because even if you quit reading one book, the fact that you stopped reading a book does not change the fact that you still have access to tens of thousands of other ebooks in the KU library for the remainder of that month, which is the thing that you are ostensibly paying for. (I don't phone Netflix to request a partial refund if I start watching the first episode of Bojack Horseman and quit halfway through the first episode, I just start watching Stranger Things or Narcos instead.)

If authors don't like this arrangement, they are free to not participate in Kindle Unlimited, and sell their books under a more traditional model (where the author sets a price, and people can buy the book for that price irrespective of any participation in any sort of subscription program).

[aratauto]

Apparently Amazon initially paid authors by e-book downloaded by users, but some authors abused this model. E.g. by splitting a 300-pages book to 6 50-pages books. It also enabled plain fraud, where fraudsters created accounts to download large numbers of books from Kindle Unlimited paid by unscrupulous authors.

[exolymph]

It's opt-in, you don't have to make your books available for Kindle Unlimited.

[Wowfunhappy]

But with Kindle Unlimited, you run into the "Someone Else's Money" problem.

Say a user reads the first page of 100 different books—they can do that, because opening each new book has zero marginal cost for the user. Does Amazon now need to pay authors for 100 books?

I don't know how Netflix payouts work but I have to imagine that viewer time is taken into account.

[m463]

The question is -- if you turn whispersync off (and popular highlights and real-time hightlights etc...)

Does Amazon respect you and turn off data collection?

Or better yet - does it ask you before turning it on?

[rtkwe]

There's a less invasive way to do that though by storing the latest location for each device. You don't need to store each and every page turn for the page sync feature.

[Kuiper]

This is apparently how older Kindle models worked, which has made them an attack vector for fraud on Kindle Unlimited:

>KDP [Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's self-publishing platform] pays authors for both paid downloads as well as for pages read and it doesn’t sense reading speed, just the highest number of pages reached. ...

>The way that the book-stuffing con works is that scammers stuff lots of extra content into an ebook before uploading it to Kindle Unlimited, and then trick readers into jumping to the end of the book.

>Thanks to a flaw in the Kindle platform, namely that the platform knows your location in a book but not how many pages you have actually read, the scammers can get paid for a user having “read” a book in Kindle Unlimited by getting the user to jump to the last page. ...

>Interestingly, the flip-to-end scam doesn’t quite work on newer Kindles but still works on older, non-updated Kindles which makes it still a lucrative scam.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited...

[jbob2000]

Then the next news article will read "Amazon stores the locations of where you are in your ebooks!".

You can't have your cake and eat it too, amazon needs to store something to make this feature work.

[tqi]

How is "tapped on page 11" different from "is on page 12"?

[bduerst]

Correct me if I'm wrong, isn't that how whispersync works now?

[jordache]

How is recording a tap invasive?

[alkibiades]

so how is that implemented? wouldn’t you just record the current page each time it changes? which is essentially the same as loggingh page turn?