Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon

Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by spullara on Monday April 18, 2016 @12:45PM (#11521262)

Based on that article having your table of contents at the end of the book is probably trying to scam more pages. Obviously Amazon needs to fix their page accounting system but taking advantage of it in this way is pretty awful and his books should be removed until they are fixed.

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by spatten on Monday April 18, 2016 @01:04PM (#11521419)

For what it's worth, it used to be pretty standard to put the ToC at the back of the book when making epub and mobi files.

We did it at Leanpub, and I'm pretty sure we were just following what the Prags and (if I remember correctly) O'Reilly were doing.

The reason was that opening an epub and flipping through a long ToC before you get to the book is really annoying. There is a way to set the "starting page" in epubs, but many ebook readers ignored this at the time and just opened at the title-page, so putting the ToC at the end was just a better reader experience.

Now that most e-readers use the start-page setting properly, ToCs are mostly at the beginning of ebooks.

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by teh_klev on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @11:16AM (#11527558)

I never knew this, thanks for the insight and history behind this approach.

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by cstross on Monday April 18, 2016 @01:54PM (#11521825)

In WJW's case it's based on traditional aesthetics: he writes novels, he doesn't want to omit the ToC completely but he expects readers to want to start with the text itself rather than wading through pages of ToCs.

(Trust me on this: I've known him in meatspace for about 15 years and he's simply not technically-minded enough to be trying to game the system: he's a novelist, not a programmer.)

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by davidgay on Monday April 18, 2016 @10:22PM (#11524503)

For extra fun: table-of-contents at the end is the convention for French books.

Given that Kindle Unlimited is available in France (according to http://ebookfriendly.com/kindle-unlimited-ebook-subscription...), I wonder what they do...

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by eloff on Monday April 18, 2016 @01:35PM (#11521679)

I really don't think he was trying to scam 1 more page read in books that probably number at least 300 pages...

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by 0942v8653 on Monday April 18, 2016 @01:50PM (#11521793)

It's not about the number of pages—if the ToC was moved to the beginning, the total count would be the same—it's about having people skip to the last page to look at the ToC even if they don't plan to finish the book.

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by meric on Monday April 18, 2016 @05:45PM (#11523379)

Why would people skip to the last page to look at ToC of a novel? He put it there so people don't have to look at it.

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Re:Kindle Unlimited scammers on Amazon by spullara on Monday April 18, 2016 @03:43PM (#11522617)

Read the article on how the scam works.

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