I have seen much outrage (and confusion) since Amazon announced it was to make changes to the payment structure for books. In case you haven’t heard about it, the Publishers Weekly article goes into detail about it here.

A lot of the criticism seems to come from an initial bout of ‘you’ll only get paid if someone finishes the book’. In fact the statement is as follows:

Under this new model, the amount an author earns will be determined by their share of total pages read rather than their share of total qualified borrows.

At the moment, this also only applies to books that are in the kdp select programme, which pays out a percentage based on those borrows as part of Kindle Unlimited or the Kindle Owners Lending Library. I’m processing how I feel about this, but two obvious things spring to mind.

Firstly, this is potentially the tip of the iceberg that becomes the standard model for all books, irrespective of whether they were purchased outright rather than borrowed. While I know most people who aren’t in the game will assume that this kind of change will only have any real impact on self-published authors, I know there are a lot of books out there that have hit the best seller charts and yet nobody ever actually gets round to finishing or reading.

Secondly, how much data is Amazon actually collecting on people? Number of page reads and the amount of time spent on each one in order for it to actually qualify as being ‘read’ seems like getting down to a level of granularity that is quite off-putting. No lingering or re-reading that favourite sex scene over and over. Big brother is watching you (and now really knows what you like).

As with all change, there are pros and cons. I can see the value of someone who has produced a good, 200 page book being paid more than someone who has churned out a 20 page quickie. However, that does set a dangerous assumption that quality is the same as length, which we all know isn’t true. Get your mind out of the gutter, I’m still talking about books here.

The reality is that Amazon can do largely what it wants, as it is by far the largest retailer of ebooks. Nothing else really comes close. However, that is reliant on people using the kindle as the ereader of choice, and on authors being willing to upload their words. Being the market dominator can change quickly when your customers decide to take a look at those alternatives after all.

Just ask Blackberry.