If you own a Kindle book, you can loan it to a friend for a few weeks. I'm pretty sure the author gets nothing out of that transaction.
Which makes sense. People loan books to their friends all the time, along with pressure cookers, punch bowls, and lawn mowers. It's a private interaction—original manufacturers tend to stay out of it.
But there is also something called the Kindle Lending Library. In this case, when a book is borrowed, the author gets a taste. Amazon puts money into a monthly fund to reward the writer on a prorated basis. Used to be, prorated by the number of borrows of your book verses all others in the borrowed pool.
That, you may know, has recently changed.
Nowadays, the mere fact of making a borrow doesn't get the author much. The book must be "read" for the writer to collect his or her reward.
According to Amazon, authors of big books felt they were getting short changed, receiving the same money for a borrow as the fellow with a short book.
That also makes sense, I guess. The cost of buying a book (and the royalty paid the author) is usually related to the manufacturing costs as dictated by the number of pages of print. Big books cost more to make, to ship, and to store.
On the other hand, that bit of traditional wisdom is strongly linked to traditional publishing. Ebooks are not manufactured in the same way, nor stored in a warehouse awaiting shipment. As a result, such costs are not a factor. And shipping costs are borne by the author in the form of higher download fees (for books with a 70% royalty).
Authors likely spend more time writing longer books, and if they send that thing out to be cleaned before putting it on the market, freelance editing costs are usually connected to word count.
Of course, when it comes to selling books, indie authors can price their works according to the magnitude of their effort and the balance sheet of their expenses. Despite the fact actual demand for the item is more likely to rule the day. If nobody wants a particular big book, pricing it higher might not be the way to entice buyers.
(Though I'm not saying it would never work. I read about an author who accidentally priced his book too high and was rewarded by more readers. The whole matter of ebook pricing is closer to voodoo than standardised business practices.)
Under the new regime, Amazon has invented something they call Kindle Edition Normalized Pages (KENP). The precise definition of a KENP unit is probably out there somewhere, for writers looking to game the system.
Amazon claims to be paying attention to how many of these KENPs are read by the borrower. I would imagine it would be like the text boxes containing various end-user agreements you have to check off before you can get what you want out of a site or downloaded program—you have to scroll to the bottom to activate the "accept" button.
Open a Kindle edition in your reader and keep hitting Page Down until you get to the end. That should count as a "read," right? Or will they add up the number of seconds you spent poring over each page, then compare it to your past reading habits? Or to some "standardized" page-reading time?
Aside from better rewarding the authors of doorstop e-tomes, I suspect Amazon was loathe to send dough to writers just because they found a way of getting their friends and families to DL books for free (Prime customers). Are there Web sites or services doing this for a cut of the money? Operating a KENP-based book complicates any automated system for generating spurious income for authors. Is that part of the reason for the change?
In the old days, a for-fee lending library might charge more if the book was popular. Simple supply and demand. Ebooks have no problem with high demand. And a book downloaded for free costs no more if lots of people are reading it.
For fiction, readers often want to spend the most time possible in a world of make-believe. Non-fiction readers want to get the juice squeezed out and quickly dispensed.
Folks who write pithy non-fiction are going to take a hit, especially if they produce the sort of book readers sense is not something they care to own. Traditional publishers lean on non-fiction authors to come up with a manuscript of sufficient bulk to warrant a "proper" book price.
Ebook writers of non-fiction could theoretically ignore that pressure, deliver a terse text, and price it accordingly. But those who rely on borrows to feed the bulldog may have to revert to the traditional bulked-up word count to keep that tail wagging. I doubt this strategy will result in better books.
And in the long run, better books better be your goal.
In so far as Amazon encourages writers to pump things up unnecessarily, they do us all (readers included) a disservice.
Don't you think? Or don't you?
