Thursday, April 28, 2016

Amazon Kindle Unlimited Scammers

Brady Dale (via Bruce Schneier):

Amazon created Kindle Unlimited, a Netflix for books, that’s delivering indie authors revenue and readers. But it turns out that the way it works may have created an opportunity for scammers to steal earnings from real writers producing genuine works.

[…]

Kindle Unlimited authors get paid out of a pool of funds set up by Amazon each month ($14.9 million in March 2016). Their cut of that pool is determined by the number of pages a reader reads in their books, not by the number of books readers check out. Top performers get an extra boost of as much as $25,000 in one month for being a top ten author.

But, what if someone finds a way to trick Amazon into believing that “readers” have read thousands of pages, when in reality they haven’t read any?

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