The burgeoning field of ebooks is rife with controversies over exclusivity, ownership, piracy, and big corporations against meek and powerless independent authors. And so it’ll be interesting to see how Amazon.com’s new $6 million initiative to pay authors royalties on how many “borrows” their books get from the Kindle’s free lending library pays out. All the authors have to promise is that their work will be available digitally only on the Kindle, for people who own Kindles.
Here’s how Amazon says it’s going to work:
The monthly royalty payment for each KDP Select [the name of the initiative] book is based on that book’s share of the total number of borrows of all participating KDP books in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. For example, if total borrows of all participating KDP Select books are 100,000 in December and an author’s book was borrowed 1,500 times, they will earn $7,500 in additional royalties from KDP Select in December. Amazon expects the fund to be at least $6 million for all of 2012, in addition to the $500,000 allocated for December 2011. Enrolled titles will remain available for sale to any customer in the Kindle Store and authors will continue to earn their regular royalties on those sales.
Interesting that there seems to be a “curve” setting mechanic at work here. Amazon says it expects to shell out at least $6 million to authors in the next year, not counting $500k this month. Is this pretty big news for any independent authors out there? Or does the fact that you’d be competing against the rest of the books in the Kindle library make it a little weirder?
To read the whole press release, go here.
(via /.)
