For the many authors who publish directly through Amazon, the new model could warp the priorities of writing: A system with per-page payouts is a system that rewards cliffhangers and mysteries across all genres. It rewards anything that keeps people hooked, even if that means putting less of an emphasis on nuance and complexity.

Currently, to pay the authors who publish through Amazon directly, the company sets aside a pool of cash each month—this month it is $3 million—and divides it among the authors. In the past, Amazon measured the number of "borrows," or downloads, and computed each author’s share of the pool accordingly. In February, one "borrow" of one of my books was worth $1.38. That's not a bad amount for a short book, but it's much less than the royalties that a big book might earn.

Starting in July, Amazon will divvy up the pool based on how many pages are read. This per-page model applies to books published through Amazon that are read as part of the Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Online Lending Library programs. Amazon offers a few different Netflix-like subscriptions to its various collections of books. Access to the “Lending Library” is a perk of Amazon Prime membership (which costs $99 per year), and the Kindle Unlimited service costs $9.99 per month. Both programs claim to offer access to more than 800,000 titles.

While many larger publishers’ offerings are included in these programs, the details of those deals have not been made public. Their authors may or may not be paid by the page. Amazon’s announcement only says that the new formula applies to Kindle Select books that are self-published and distributed through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.

Amazon’s letter to writers who publish through its Kindle Select program explained that the formula was changing because of a concern "that paying the same for all books regardless of length may not provide a strong enough alignment between the interests of authors and readers." Amazon is being clever: While the authors of big, long, and important books felt that they were shortchanged by a pay-by-the-borrow formula, they probably didn't expect that Amazon would take their proposal a step further. Instead of paying the most ambitious, long-winded authors for each page written, Amazon will pay them for each page read.

Can the system be gamed? Authors won't be able to rely on that old high-school trick of using a bigger font, because there’s a new standardized metric, the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC), which kicks off at the "Start Reading Location.” However, the strategy of adding illustrations as filler could pay off. As the documentation notes, "Non-text elements within books including images, charts and graphs will count toward a book’s KENPC."

"We think this is a solid step forward," a spokesperson for Amazon told me in an email. "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."