That whole novel they sent out as an excuse is bullshit. Nothing of it makes sense.

I have run affiliate programs myself in the past - if they can't deal with the technology and/or the cheaters, HOW THE FUCK are they supposed to run a publishing platform with > 100K authors (and all the crap submissions, and the fraudulent readers... and so on...)... JOKE.

They never intended to pay out the bounty (maybe just a couple big joint venture partners), they just:

• scammed everybody and got a metric fuck ton of free marketing
• harvested a TON of email addresses for NOTHING
• harvested more related data (Names, Ether addresses, etc.) with the claim form...

Data sellers. Fraudsters.

And the 'free books' will be long forgotten, because even if they build the platform, it won't be online before next year...