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: 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.