Publishing's Swiftian future | The Bookseller

Could a little bit of Swiftian kick-back help the book business too? It is worth contrasting Apple's manoeuvre with the changes Amazon made to how it will pay indie writers signed up to its all-you-can-read Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL). The change (in brief) is that from 1st July authors with books in those schemes will no longer be paid their percentage of Amazon's pool of money once 10% of a book has been read, they will now be paid based on what the number of pages read, after the Amazon-mandated "Start Reading Location" (SRL). The switch prompted much discussion, much of it captured by my colleague Porter Anderson here. Some see it as a way of preventing authors gaming the old system - by creating numerous smaller works, each paying out individually - others as an example of how influential Amazon could become in how authors think about their work.