I look at it like this:Graeme Hague said:How do you "know" that KU cannibalizes sales? I'm not being argumentative... I'm genuinely interested in any info along these lines. My albeit very modest sales have declined and I cling to my trickle of page reads. The idea that leaving KU might bring my sales back up at all is intriguing, but at the same time why would anyone subscribed to KU buy any books? Aren't KU readers and non-KU readers two different targets altogether?
Sales are from people who like to read the same books over and over.
KU2 reads are from people who read once, and never go back to a read book again.
They are polarized ends of the reader spectrum.
Between them are the people who use KU to vet read something new, who then buy what they like, or buy to support an author they want to keep writing.
I dont see KU2 as cannibalizing sales. Instead, its providing a different way of obtaining books, which gives the reader more choice. If anything, I think it boosts overall reading, by making the cost to the read only once people much more reasonable, allowing them to choose to read what they may not have chosen before. For us authors, the bottom line is as long as a full read pays about the same as a sale, it makes no difference if its bought or KU read.
I use a spreadsheet daily, where I enter in sales and pages read for each book, and it calculates the number of full reads for the day, and the grand total.
Borrows is a completely different thing, internal to the Amazon ranking process. While it would be good to be able to compare actual borrows with full read stats, thus showing us how many true full reads we get, Amazon is not likely to give us this info.
Borrows only mattered with KU1. But they didn't tell you how many full reads you had either.