Your E-Book Is Reading You.
From The Wall Street Journal:
From Alexandra Alter,
“It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.
“In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.”
Read the rest of the article here: The Wall Street Journal
Amazon, Apple, Apps, Big Publishing, Disruptive Innovation, Ebook Subscriptions, Ebook/Ereader Growth, Ebook/Ereader Technical, Ebooks, iPad, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Smashwords, Tablets, The Business of Writing
, Amazon will pay Passive Guy a small affiliate commission on any of your purchases.
“the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.”
Julia,
Hah. Lots of luck with that. Throw it into Calibre and turn the internet connection OFF, try and phone home now!
I dunno, I guess I’m okay with the bean counters learning how I read, but I’m just a bit uncomfortable with them fiddling with the innards of my computing.
Hence, VPN, TOR, Open DNS, and simply turning it off. My kindle and Ipad only have a connection as long as I permit it.
brendan
But isn’t the software accumulating information when you read that is sent home as soon as you connect for something else, like getting a new book?
You probably agreed to this on one of those long software agreements no one ever reads.
You can delay them getting the information, but you might not be able to alter the information they eventually get.
I’m pretty sure that the Kindle has an option to turn it off, though I didn’t find it in the Kindle for Android app when I looked there a couple of nights ago.
The reason Amazon and B&N are collecting this information is not to spy on you, the reader but to make a better book. As the article states, the Big 6 have never done any kind of research. No focus groups, no reader polls, nothing that the other entertainment industries have done for years. Amazon and B&N can do research with an e-reader. That will allow them to make a better, easier to read, more engaging book. Readers win (as long as they don’t sell the Republican party email addresses of Das Capital readers or vice versa
. E–Reader publishers are looking to replace the Big 6 with in-house publishing. Publishers once enjoyed 20% EBITA that has since dwindled to 3-4%. And that will only get worse. Amazon has everything to gain from offering better books than Harper Collins.
As I pointed out in my article Wither the Big 6?, 20th century publishers are ripe for a take down. Amazon and B&N can replace or acquire them in the long run. Until then, they keep the relevant marketing info to themselves and build a better mousetrap.
I never underline or make notes in books. I just read them. Even when I wrote papers in college, I could never wrap my brain around marking up a book. I would put bookmarks in and work from that.
Turned all that note stuff off on my Kindle. It annoys me.
What you turned off was seeing what other people underlined. As the article states, when you agree to the Kindle terms, you agree to let them collect information on where you start/stop, abandon, speed of turning pages, etc.
I can see where it might help craft better future books but revising books based on it leads to the stuff Kristine Rusch mentioned in her last blog post on Perfection.
Personally I’d like to know if 5% of people quit my book on page 7 so that I can learn from it. But I can easily imagine authors and editors obsessing over the data.
“authors and editors obsessing over the data.”
Wayne,
Harumph….I dread the thought of the book designed by the camel-dung committee.
Reality books!
brendan
Ultraviolet Books is alpha-testing interesting proprietary “Document Analytics” tech from an unannounced startup in Seattle. In addition to the data described in that Wall Street Journal article, we learn things like the words the reader looks up in the built-in Kindle dictionary, and titles of other books on the same Kindle.
Knowing where the reader drops out of (stops reading) one of our books is potentially quite useful. Revision based on that feedback doesn’t imply “design by committee” any more than it would at a writers’ workshop. We push out new versions to correct typos, so why not revise unpopular scenes? So far the data has been ambiguous here, and we haven’t undertaken revisions. But I’m sure it will happen.
http://ultravioletbooks.com/2012/07/document-analytics/
Or revise blurbs to foreshadow the scene, so the people who “bounce” don’t pick up the book at all.
Excellent point. Half the time someone quits a story is probably due to it turning out to be something other than what they expected, not because the scene itself was so intrinsically bad. Even if it is simply like the 10th bad scene of 10 and the readers are realizing the book won’t get better at the same point, that doesn’t make that scene any worse than the previous ones. I know for me, reading, if I hit a meh or even bad scene I will keep going if the story has hooked me at all. With rare exceptions. Egregiously bad dialogue will make me stop like nothing else.
While I don’t like the “Big Brother” aspect of reading e-books that you’ve covered – I hate to think what will be surreptitiously discovered! – I’m addicted to the interactivity of it.
Like most readers, I love words, and when reading an e-book on my tablet I really appreciate that I can look up the dictionary definition with only a touch – as well as the word’s origin. Wow.
When an e-book, say a bio like Just Kids by Patti Smith, refers to a song, I can go to YouTube and listen to it. When the book refers to a painting, a location, a person I don’t know, I can look it up on the Internet. This adds so much to the reading experience – which I already loved anyway – that I can hardly bring myself to read a print book anymore.
So bring on the e-books – in spite of the spying!
Cheers,
Inara Everett
http://www.jurisfictional.com
The potential for abuse of this sort of information is deeply worrying.
Gathering generalised information about how a book is read is one thing. But this information will be easily attributed to a given individual if need be.
How long before the Government / Law Enforcement / Security Agencies decide this is precisely the kind of information they need to do their job better and either demand or surreptitiously obtain the data for their own purposes?
How long before individuals of doubtful character with access to the data start abusing this information for their own ends? I’m sure there are many people – teachers, politicians, etc – who would prefer their private reading habits remain private.
Fortunately I have no choice but to download a title to my hard-drive and then transfer by cable to my e-reader, so Big Brother know only the titles I buy, not which pages are paragraphs I find interesting enough to linger over.
“so Big Brother know only the titles I buy, not which pages are paragraphs I find interesting enough to linger over.”
Mark,
Second question is easy, the mucky bits.
Signed, (Faceless Government official)
LOL! As a thriller writer I tend to linger and make notes on other thrillers where information comes with a personal touch. For example I can learn far more about a particular firearm from reading a Jack Reacher novel than from finding a dull article on the net, which will give you all the dull specs but not how it feels to handle.
Not enough time to read books with mucky bits any more, but if I did I wouldn’t want the likes of Amazon and co. recording it for future reference.
Amazon show quite clearly their inability to use collected date sensibly, as witness the ludicrous emails they persistently send me inviting me to buy goods I’ve never ever, ever expressed an interest in.
And this is why I truly dislike the ‘cloud’ aspects of eBooks.
Mind you I’m one of those people who refuses store-cards and pays cash.
If you are reading from the cloud then the data is being sent back and fore. Of course somebody is going to data-mine it.
One very good reason why print books will not disappear. That and the fact that people can change the file held on the servers and you would never know if you hadn’t read it before. Imagine if the constitution of the United States only existed in the cloud — and nobody knew what the original wording was anymore.
I agree with Mr. Williams that giving up privacy is generally a bad thing. When we have religious wing-nuts lurking so dangerously close to power these days, the possibilities are chilling.
And as much as I believe in democracy, I don’t want to create my art according to popular demand. It may work for Tawna Fenske (whom I do admire) but “popular” doesn’t necessarily mean “good”. Most great books weren’t terribly popular in their day. Would we really be better off if Fitzgerald had taken a poll of Saturday Evening Post readers asking if Gatsby should die or have a happy-ever-after with Daisy?
Thank you, Anne. My sentiments as well.
To be fair, there are atheist wing-nuts lurking dangerously close to power too.
“To be fair, there are atheist wing-nuts lurking dangerously close to power too.”
C.R.
If you refer to the USA, could you name a couple of names?
brendan