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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday June 12 2018, @06:41AM   Printer-friendly
from the scamming-the-big-guys dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow8317

A few levels past the bestsellers and sci-fi/romance/adventure titles on Kindle Unlimited, in the darkest corners of the Kindle Direct Publishing market, there are books that are made entirely out of garbage designed to make scammers hundreds of dollars a day. One user, who called his or herself Chance Carter, was one of the biggest abusers of the KDP system and, more important, made over $15 per book they uploaded to the system, over and over, for books that contained no real content.

Carter, according to the Digital Reader, would create large novels out of other books. The books, which were simple hack jobs written by Fiverr writers, were hundreds of pages long and, on the first page, featured a recommendation to flip to the last page to get a free giveaway. KDP 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. Therefore Chance's "readers" were instantly sending him or her about twenty dollars a read.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/11/notorious-kindle-unlimited-abuser-has-been-booted-from-the-bookstore/


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Tuesday June 12 2018, @07:57AM (1 child)

    by SanityCheck (5190) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @07:57AM (#691822)

    Amazon makes shitty system,
    Someone abuses shitty system for profit
    ????
    Outrage?

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  • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday June 12 2018, @12:58PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Tuesday June 12 2018, @12:58PM (#691869) Journal

    It was bound to happen. Resources that publishers should have spent on making good systems, checking their designs for obvious problems, instead have been thrown away to fight their War on Sharing. They're still fervent, clinging believers in copyright and the notion that most everyone in the world is a depraved, shameless, thieving pirate.

    And this problem is embarrassingly obvious. Release system that was hastily designed and has huge, gaping exploits, and what do you expect will happen? The problems will be found, and the world will beat a path through those holes. They should be glad it's not far worse, with hordes of angry, vengeful, and starving people pushing the various weak systems we use to collapse.