Amazon is changing the way it pays authors. Starting on July 1st, the company will switch from paying Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners' Lending Library (KOLL) royalties based on qualified borrows, to paying based on the number of pages read.

The change is made off the back of feedback given to the company from authors, who requested a restructure of the royalty payment scheme. 

Under the new payment method, authors will be paid for each page individual customers read of their book, the first time they read it.

Payment from Amazon works on the division of a global fund, called the KDP Select Global Fund. The change the company are making will see the fund divided up each month based on pages read as opposed to the previous method which saw the fund segregated based on 'total qualified borrows'.

Amazon gave an example of how the fund would work.

"The author of a 100 page book that was borrowed and read completely 100 times would earn $1,000 ($10 million multiplied by 10,000 pages for this author divided by 100,000,000 total pages)," the company said in a statement.

Using larger text to bloat out pages won't work as a good financial idea. The company are using a Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count, which will ensure that page counts are measured on a consistent basis.