Amazon announced another changed in how they will compensate self-published authors who participate in the Kindle Unlimited subscription payment pool. In July the system switched from paying for every download to paying based on pages read — and now those per-page rates are becoming much more complicated, international, and opaque. Starting with the November fund […]
Subscription
Subscription Service Blloon Closes
It’s no big surprise that European-based subscription service Blloon is officially closing at the end of October. The subscription program was spun out of ebook technology provider and platform txtr — which went insolvent earlier this year, before pieces of the operation and some of its personnel were picked up by retailer Media-Saturn — and both […]
Oyster Shutting Down, In Google AcquiHire
Ebook subscription service Oyster announced late Monday afternoon in a blog post that the company would wind down operations “over the next several months.” Publishers told us to expect this development earlier in the day, as part of a sale of Oyster. The subscription company then confirmed to Re/code that “a portion” of staff are […]
Amazon KU Payment Drops 11 Percent For August
Amazon decided — as usual, in their sole judgment, based on undisclosed data — that they will pay KDP Select authors a total of $11.8 million for Kindle Unlimited subscription reading in August. That’s up from the $11.3 million pool divided up for July. But with the money being shared across 2.3 billion pages read, […]
Simon & Schuster Tries A Kindle Unlimited Experiment
Since Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited subscription program launched just over a year ago, agency contracts have prevented the etailer from putting the five largest publishers’ books into the initiative without consent — though that hasn’t stopped Amazon from pulling in selected books from non-agency publishers without permission, paying for them like any other sale. But earlier […]
Next, Scribd Curtails Unlimited Audiobooks
Following substantial reductions in their catalog of romance titles at the end of June, Scribd announced in a blog post last Friday a substantial curtailment of the distinctive unlimited audiobooks included in their monthly subscription offering. As of September 20, subscribers will be limited to a single audiobook per month from one part of the […]