This week’s stories about Amazon’s new payment method – “Pay-per-page: Amazon to align payment with how much customers read” was the headline here – gave the impression that the system would apply to all self-published authors whose books are available on Kindle, and that their royalties would be brutally cut if readers didn’t get very far into the book. At first blush, it looked bad, and my first reaction was anger. The reality proved more complicated.

The new method of payment doesn’t apply to books that have been purchased but to those that are borrowed as part of Kindle Unlimited, which allows for – you guessed it – unlimited reading of KU books in exchange for a subscription fee.

Self-published authors can opt in via Amazon’s KDP Select programme, which gives them a cut from a fund calculated by Amazon on a monthly basis: for June 2015, it’s $3m (£1.9m). This naturally puts a cap on author’s earnings, as they can never earn more than the fund allows and are competing for a share with all the other authors on the programme.



Amazon used to start paying royalties on the borrowed book once a reader got to 10% of the way through, but this was proving unfair to authors who wrote longer books. A reader perusing a short book reaches the trigger point for payment much faster than one reading an 800-page tome. The result was a flood of very short reads as authors spread their writing over as many books as possible.



Heavy reading ... the 2014 Baileys women’s prize for fiction 2014 including Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (third from top). Photograph: Rex

The new pay-per-page method means that payment is made every time a reader turns a page during their first read. The precise meaning of “page” is set by Amazon via the Kindle Edition Normalised Page Count (KENPC) to ensure that inflated fonts, wide line-spacing and big margins won’t fool the system. You also need to spend a particular amount of time on a page before it counts as read. (I won’t linger on the surveillance point, as that’s a slightly different issue.)

On the surface, it makes sense not to punish those who write longer books, and much of the controversy seems to have stemmed from misinformation and confusing headlines. But while Amazon’s new system has solved one problem, it may yet spawn another. Instead of penalising long books, the system could penalise shorter reads – assuming the amount paid per page is the same for any book, regardless of length.

We all know that quantity doesn’t equal quality, especially not in the books world. In traditional publishing, books of many different sizes are sold at the same price. On my bookshelves, for instance:

American Gods by Neil Gaiman (pb) – 640 pages: £8.99

The Queen of the Tearling by Erika Johansen (pb) – 512 pages: £7.99

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (pb) – 177 pages: £7.99

No author is obviously penalised or rewarded for the length of their book. However, if it prices writing by pages read, Amazon’s system may lead to authors writing significantly longer books in order to maximise profit, which means digital publishing could have an impact on the way authors write their books. TechCrunch summed it up beautifully: “The e-commerce behemoth is deploying economic levers to shape creative content in the interests of ebook selling.”



Some authors may see this as a perk of the digital publishing age. Assuming they can access the data from their readers, they may find it useful to see where people are dropping out of the book, how much the average person is reading, and if they’re making it to the end. They might want to learn from their readers’ habits and apply the knowledge to their next book – in short, to use the data to write “better books”.

But now we’re getting into murky territory. It is impossible to write a book that every reader will enjoy. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, close to 800 pages long, failed to keep many Kobo readers engaged all the way through; data showed that around 55% of readers did not finish it. Yet The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer prize for fiction. Do the figures prove that Tartt needs to learn from her readers and write a “better” book next time, despite being awarded one of the highest literary honours? Should she follow the numbers, or write the books she wants to?



The major issue surrounding Amazon’s announcement was the shadow it cast over the future of publishing. What if Amazon rolled out this method of payment for all of its books, not just loans? Does this set an ominous precedent for the publishing industry, already beset by the challenges of a digital world?





I should start off by saying that I think it’s extremely unlikely – Amazon would alienate too many content creators – but let’s roll with it in theory. Let’s say that Amazon decides to pay authors only by the page, and that the reader need never pay the full price for a whole book they’ve downloaded, or even get a refund for pages they haven’t read.

“If readers give up on a title after half-a-dozen pages,” crime writer Kerry Wilkinson told the Telegraph, “why should the writer be paid in full?” Here is where I respectfully disagree.



I’ve read books that have taken a while to get into and ended up loving them. If I’d given up after six pages, I would never have experienced that. However, you do have the right to give up on a book. If it isn’t not holding your attention, you are free to stop, move on, and never look back. I’m not going to argue that you somehow owe your time to me if you buy my book.

You have a right, as a paying customer, to do whatever you like with your purchase. You can walk out of a cinema if you’re not enjoying a film. If you buy a piece of cake and take a bite out of it, only to discover you don’t like the taste, you are welcome to throw it away. Nobody will force you to finish it. However, you can’t hand it back to the baker and ask for a refund unless there is something objectively wrong with it – if the cake has a fingernail in it, for example.



But, provided the type is the right way up and no pages are missing, there can be nothing objectively wrong with the written content of a book, any more than there can be with the visual content of a film, or the sound of a song. It is impossible to quantify the value of an author’s writing. So the argument that the creator should not be paid the full price for a download, based on an individual’s taste or what they do with the product, is weak.

No matter what your personal opinion, books do have actual value. This is all too easily forgotten on a Kindle, where they can be mentally reduced to little more than Word documents. “It didn’t cost them anything to make a digital copy,” it’s easy to say. But, just as a cake has ingredients and a baker, books have the people that put them together: the author has invested time and effort into what appears on your screen. So have the editor, the commissioning editor, the cover designer, the copy-editor, the proofreader, the illustrator, the publicist, the literary agent, marketing team, the person who formats it for your e-reader. A book, even in digital format, is the culmination of hours, weeks, months, even years, of actual, objective work. And everyone who works is entitled to be paid for it, no matter how much they love the work they’re doing. All of that is what you’re paying for when you download a book – not just the content.



This bleeds into a much broader argument about the value of art in society, and the idea that art is somehow cheapened if the artist receives a fair wage. For now, this is all hypothetical, and it remains to be seen how the pay-per-page scheme will work out on KDP Select. But in this digital age, we do have to work hard to maintain the value of what can be easily distributed for free online, as Taylor Swift showed when she stood up to Apple and asked for her fair pay. Music, film and books are three particularly vulnerable areas. If we allow each individual to determine the value of art, its overall value, and the price we’re willing to pay for it, will slowly decay: and with it, its creators.

So Amazon could be nudging us towards a world where books are no longer considered finished objects, the complete product of people’s very real work. Where they are small, fragmented units of data, each component measured separately to determine value. Where books are just the parts, and not the sum of them: pages, percentages, bits and pieces to be cherry-picked. As author and editor Peter Maass said, we don’t only pay for how much of a burger we eat.