In one of his typically bright, observant posts, Nicholas Carr wryly tackles Amazon’s new scheme of paying Kindle Unlimited authors based on how many of their pages are read, a system which reduces the written word to a granular level of constant, non-demanding engagement. 

There’s an argument to be made that like systems have worked quite well in the past: Didn’t Charles Dickens publish under similar if not-as-precisely-quantified circumstances when turning out his serial novels? Sort of. Maybe not to the same minute degree, but he was usually only as good as his last paragraph (which, thankfully, was always pretty good).

The difference is while it worked for Dickens, this process hasn’t been the motor behind most of the great writing in our history. James Joyce would not have survived very well on this nano scale. Neither would have Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Marcel Proust, etc. Their books aren’t just individual pages leafed together but a cumulative effect, a treasure that comes only to those who clear obstacles.

Shakespeare may have had to pander to the groundlings to pay the theater’s light bill, but what if the lights had been turned off mid-performance if he went more than a page without aiming for the bottom of the audience?

Carr’s opening:

When I first heard that Amazon was going to start paying its Kindle Unlimited authors according to the number of pages in their books that actually get read, I wondered whether there might be an opportunity for an intra-Amazon arbitrage scheme that would allow me to game the system and drain Jeff Bezos’s bank account. I thought I might be able to start publishing long books of computer-generated gibberish and then use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to pay Third World readers to scroll through the pages at a pace that would register each page as having been read. If I could pay the Turkers a fraction of a penny less to look at a page than Amazon paid me for the “read” page, I’d be able to get really rich and launch my own space exploration company.

Alas, I couldn’t make the numbers work. Amazon draws the royalties for the program from a fixed pool of funds, which serves to cap the upside for devious scribblers.

So much for my Mars vacation. Still, even in a zero-sum game that pits writer against writer, I figured I might be able to steal a few pennies from the pockets of my fellow authors. (I hate them all, anyway.) I would just need to do a better job of mastering the rules of the game, which Amazon was kind enough to lay out for me:

Under the new payment method, you’ll be paid for each page individual customers read of your book, the first time they read it. … To determine a book’s page count in a way that works across genres and devices, we’ve developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). We calculate KENPC based on standard settings (e.g. font, line height, line spacing, etc.), and we’ll use KENPC to measure the number of pages customers read in your book, starting with the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of your book.

The first thing that has to be said is that if you’re a poet, you’re screwed.•