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Page turners will rake it in as Amazon changes writer royalty metric

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By John McCarthy, Opinion Editor

June 22, 2015 | 2 min read

Amazon has announced it will start paying its Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL) writers by the number of pages read by consumers.

From 1 July, the e-commerce giant will shift reimburse authors by the volume of pages read.

On how the system would work, Amazon provided an example: “The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000.”

Using the newly established Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) to calculate an average length of each book regardless of how it is displayed on different devices at different font sizes, Amazon said “that paying the same for all books regardless of length may not provide a strong enough alignment between the interests of authors and readers.”

An Amazon spokesperson told the Atlantic: “We think this is a solid step forward, our goal, as always, is to build a service that rewards authors for their valuable work, attracts more readers, and encourages them to read more and more often."

There are of course caveats, authors are only paid for each consumer’s first read of each page. The benefit of reading books on electronic devices is that is possible to measure the engagement of each title.

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