[Kuiper]

Authors get paid monthly, approximately two months after the royalties are earned. So if you have a KU subscription and you read 20% of a KU book in January, the author will get paid for those pages in March, and then if you continue reading book and read the remaining 80% in February, the payment for the pages that you read in February will be included in their April statement.

[mirimir]

It doesn't jive with Amazon's income from the book. I doubt that users pay for books on a percentage basis. So if someone buys a book, but doesn't read it, then Amazon gets the income, but isn't paying royalty on it.

That seems illegal.

[Kuiper]

Note: this thread is about Kindle Unlimited, which has a different monetization/payment model than regular Kindle ebooks. KU readers do not "buy" KU ebooks, any more than Netflix users "buy" the TV shows that they are streaming.

If someone pays $10/mo for access to a library of tens of thousands of books but doesn't actually read any of them, then Amazon gets income without having to pay royalties, in the same way that Netflix still gets your money if you subscribe but don't watch anything. This is true even if you decided to subscribe to KU/Netflix because "Oh, I should get around to reading Harry Potter/watching Stranger Things" and then don't get around to actually reading Harry Potter or watching Stranger Things. This is very much legal.