Totally agreed, but authors are straight fucked if they try. Popular authors in my genre of choice have tried, and they all say it was a financial disaster for them, and that they can’t afford to be a full time author author KU income. And readers will follow where authors are, since those are the books they want to read.

Amazon’s monopoly on self publishing is probably illegal, but until regulators notice, network effects and anticompetitive practices from Amazon reinforce their monopoly.

Like, my options are, literally:

• Stop reading almost all of the best books in the genre of books that I enjoy, or
• Pirate the books, or
• Read on Kindle Unlimited

Authors have also said that they’re so dependent on The Algorithm, that praying their books hits them double, from the lost revenue and from the reduced visibility. So that’s a double dick move.

I hate it, but here we are.

At least I read so much that Amazon pays authors like 10× what I pay to subscribe, so that’s pretty cool. (~300-400 books/year adds up to a lot of KENP pages!) And I’m not paying $3-5K/year for books to buy them all, sorry. I can’t afford that!