Der Spiegel reports (original article in German):
Ab Juli wird dieser Pool nun nach konkreten Nutzungsstatistiken unter den Autoren aufgeteilt. Die kommen zustande, indem jeder einzelne Kindle-E-Book-Reader das Leseverhalten seines Lesers protokolliert und an Amazon zurückmeldet.
[translation mine] Starting in July, the pool of Amazon subscriber money will be shared among authors according to concrete usage statistics. The statistics will come from individual Kindle E-Books that will record reader behavior and communicate it back to Amazon.
Is this a model for content production in the future?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by The Archon V2.0 on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:50PM
Oh, my, you read that steamy scene again the next day even though you were well past it. You weren't doing something... embarrassing, were you?
Really, I don't care if it's isolated to Kindle Monthly or Kindle Plus or Kindle From Space or whatever it's called. They have the infrastructure to collect the data on what pages one reads or rereads built right in to the system, and that concerns me.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday June 23 2015, @07:58PM
Exactly. And it WILL show up in court sooner or later that Little Johnny read something so he MUST be guilty.
This is why when I buy Ebooks, they first get passed through DRM removal and then they go into my private library manager and get converted to a common format.
I'm never buying a subscription to read random ebooks, but I do buy ebooks, and also read a lot of the free ebooks that are available.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @08:14PM
No problem. We will search your private library. We will find books containing sex scenes. We will find books containing child characters. We will convict you for possessing a library containing both children and porn. You think you have fourth and fifth amendment rights? You have no rights, peon.
~ Your Lords And Masters
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @12:46AM
This is why when I buy Ebooks, they first get passed through DRM removal and then they go into my private library manager and get converted to a common format.
I do that too, though mainly for different reasons.
I'm never buying a subscription to read random ebooks, but I do buy ebooks, and also read a lot of the free ebooks that are available.
In the abstract, I'm not opposed to the notion of a subscription service of this type. Especially if you could rate each book and the author of each book would get a share of your monthly payment proportional to the rating -- so if you read two books, both five-star or both one-star would yield the same 50-50 payout, but one one-star and one five-star would give one author 1/6 and the other 5/6. I suspect I'd not have gone for Amazon's Kindle Unlimited in any case, but the page-dependent payout was a definite deal-breaker.
The reason I buy (some) ebooks instead of pirating (all of) them is because it's an easy means of helping an author who creates works I enjoy, both directly (if rather inefficiently) with their cut of the price, and indirectly by boosting a statistic that helps them sell their next book. So as soon as I saw how Kindle Unlimited depended on page tracking to pay authors, I immediately decided I was not interested -- since I never read past the first page in the Kindle app, no authors would get paid, and Amazon would gratefully keep all the money. Might as well pirate the lot and save my money.