Migration Patterns and System Faults by John A. A. Logan
On
January 21st this year, I
decided to take a peep at my Amazon Sales Dashboard, to see how many “page
reads” I was getting on my borrowed/subscription ebooks.
I
saw that 65 pages of my short story collection, Storm Damage, had been read
that day, in the UK.
I
found I couldn’t resist going back the next day to see if more pages had been
read. None had.
So
I went back the next day. No more of Storm Damage had been read, but I saw that
one page of my novel, Agency Woman, had been read, by someone in India.
One
page. I wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
The
next day, January 24th, I went back again. 7 more pages of Agency
Woman had been read now, in India.
Went
back the next day, but nothing more. All went quiet for a while on borrows.
Then,
I noticed on February 8, in the sales dashboard, that 547 pages of my
borrowed/subscription books had been read that day.
I
did a specific search for each title, and saw that none of The Survival of Thomas
Ford or Storm Damage had been read that day.
All
547 pages were Agency Woman.
That
was good, I thought, someone had read all of Agency Woman in one day…this was
somehow gratifying…I imagined some enfevered reader hoovering Agency Woman up
relentlessly, not stopping even for a cup of tea…this made me glad I had bothered
writing it.
I
looked to see in “Month-To-Date Unit Sales” which country this reading had
happened in, and it was USA. I now imagined more specifically an enfevered American
reader, unable to stop reading, having to be taken away, cross-eyed perhaps,
for medical assistance…
A
few hours later, though, it occurred to me to check how many “Kindle Edition
Normalised Pages” were in Agency Woman, to make sure that this reader had
indeed read ALL of the book in one day as I first assumed. What if they had
left say…10 pages unread, for some reason, saving the rest for another day?
To
check this I went to “Bookshelf”, “Promote and Advertise Section”, as I
remembered from a prior check that this is where the “Kindle Edition Normalised
Pages” count for an ebook is located.
The
Amazon website product description page lists Agency Woman’s length at 308
pages, defined by Amazon as “the estimated length calculated using the number
of page turns on a Kindle, using settings to closely represent a physical book.”
But
I knew that Amazon calculates book length for Kindle Unlimited subscription
reads, or Kindle Owners’ Lending Library borrows, differently…with payment being
made for each page read…and by that system I saw that Agency Woman is listed as
an ebook of 510 “Kindle Edition Normalised Pages”.
But
the sales dashboard had told me 547 pages were read on Feb 8.
I
went back to “Month-To-Date Unit Sales”, USA section, and paid more attention
this time. It said that 510 pages had been read in the USA in February, and I
knew from the Sales Dashboard that this was the first Agency Woman read of
February…
I
went back to the Sales Dashboard again…it definitely said 547 pages of Agency Woman
had been read on 8 February.
So,
I concluded that this must be a system error. 547 pages had been listed as read
on the Sales Dashboard, but only 510 pages were listed as read in the
“Month-To-Date-Unit Sales” section…it was a small mistake for the Amazon system
to make really…
It
took me another hour to remember to search in other countries for those other
37 pages read on 8 February.
I
checked them in order. UK? None there. Germany? No. France? No. Spain? No.
Italy? No.
Netherlands?
No. Japan? No.
India?
No.
It
was the next one on the drop down menu. Canada. The other 37 pages of Agency
Woman had been read there on 8 February.
So
the Amazon system had measured it all perfectly, to the exact page.
The
only lag had been in the old Logan brain, struggling to keep up…but gratified
now at this final realisation…2 readers…in 2 different countries…on the same
day, reading Agency Woman.
One
hoovering up the whole book in one go…the other taking things more slowly…
It
only took me another week to suddenly start wondering/worrying, did I really
have a new American/Canadian reader…or did the Indian reader who had read one
page of Agency Woman on Jan 23, and 7 more pages on Jan 24, emigrate to the
USA, or Canada, in early February…
(Postscript:
There may be a pattern here – on February 19th it happened again, 1
page of Agency Woman read in USA, then on Feb 20th 4 more pages
read…and no more since…but Amazon’s watching, and so am I now …)
Comments
(P.S. Agency Woman was a very interesting philosophical spy vs. spy yarn set on Foinaven in the far north of the Scottish Highlands.)
I'm sorry that what I've written isn't helpful to anything else that you've written in the blog post. I did giggle, though, when you wrote about "an enfevered American reader, unable to stop reading, having to be taken away, cross-eyed perhaps, for medical assistance…"