• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Scammers Hit KU2

C

Chessie

Guest
Do any authors here have their books enrolled in Kindle Unlimited? I'm passing this article on from another author site; figured I'd share and spread the word here: scammers taking advantage of KU2, Amazon slow to react.

*As a status update, thousands of these scam books are being uploaded per day. Amazon apparently mentioned that they don't have the resources to check books individually, thus the scammers are making thousands while leaving legitimate authors in the dust.*
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Hi,

Saw this a couple of days ago on Facebook. Not sure how serious it is. But the guts of it is simple. KU2 was upgraded slightly recently with a new attempt to make certain that those authors who had books out which weren't being read, weren't lucky enough to have the statistics of pages read algorhythm claiming that their books had actually been read in their entirity.

In essence Amazon wants authors to be paid only for ten pages read if readers read only ten pages of the thousand page work. Their algorhythm uses page numbers to do this. So if you read page number 146 then surely you must have read the first 146 pages of the book and should be paid for it. But some authors of ebooks have been putting their table's of contents at the rear of the book, which means that readers who use them, were immediately declaring that they had read the entire book. Amazon isn't happy about that so is now insisting that TOC's must be at the front.

I haven't seen any sign so far of Amazon acting on my books - but who knows.

Cheers, Greg.
 
C

Chessie

Guest
Greg, that's correct. My understanding of the situation is that it's a fair bit more serious because Amazon actually doesn't have a way to count the exact number of pages read. Also, this ties into the whole truckload of stuffed titles that come up in the search bar minimizing the visibility for KU authors with regular titles (and stuffed is against Amazon rules too). So it's a bunch of things packed into one huge mess. It's unfortunate but there's always going to be someone gaming a system somewhere.
 
Top