This headline from Consumerist says it all: "Amazon Will Reportedly Pay Self-Published E-Book Authors $.006 Per Page Read."

According to the Guardian, that means the payments received by authors could be as little as $0.006 per page read, estimating that if an author publishes a 220-page book each page would have to be read by every person who downloads the book in order for the writer to make the $1.30 they get under the previous pay-per-download payment system.

Some authors have already left the program, "citing an estimated 60% to 80% reduction in royalties." The per-page payment system is classic Amazon-style shrewdness, in that it makes perfect sense and it's difficult to argue in terms of fairness. But even advocates for the plan have to admit that it's a hard-assed maneuver.

Think about it: when you go to a bookstore, how often do you buy books with the intent to read them right away? At least for me, the books that I buy wind up in a pile on my nightstand until the perfect moment for that particular book arrives. That moment might arrive two days after buying the book, or two years after buying the book. Maybe that day never comes.

When Amazon sells a self-published book to a customer, Amazon instantly makes money from that transaction. If the buyer never gets around to reading the e-book, the author will never make any money from that transaction. So Amazon is profiting from the author's hard work — plainly, the book wouldn't exist without the author, so Amazon would have nothing to sell — and paying nothing in return for that sale until the reader starts turning pages, a moment that is not guaranteed to ever arrive.

In this age of hyper-analytics, Amazon's new royalty policy is technically appropriate. But it's morally wrong.