

As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You - RougeFemme
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/technology/as-new-services-track-habits-the-e-books-are-reading-you.html?hp&_r=0

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moondowner
> "and help writers give readers more of what they want"

If all writers write stuff based only on what readers want to read we're
doomed.

There are great books written, that were not popular at the time of
publishing; but instead they became popular years and years later.

Even worse, this data will be used by publishers as a filter what kind of
books to produce next, and authors may have their works rejected. For example,
Orwell's Animal Farm was once rejected with the publisher saying "It is
impossible to sell animal stories in the USA". Clearly the publisher had an
opinion on what kind of books are (not) profitable. With this new data
publishers will have even more opinions.

~~~
WalterBright
Since it has never been easier for anyone to publish a book of their own
creation, I don't see "data publishers" as being gatekeepers.

------
nswanberg
My Kindle won't give me any sort of analytics for my reading. I can track my
computer program use with RescueTime, my keystrokes with SelfSpy, my travels
with my phone, and my heart rate, wattage, and location on my bike with my
GPS, but not what and when I read on my Kindle. Does anyone know of a hack to
do it? Or an e-reader that does or could be made to do it?

Separately, I'm not convinced that reading analytics would cause a big shift
in what is published. Publishing houses appear to publish what turns out to be
great literature mostly by accident, and as business tend to publish mostly
what they believe will make them money. Analytics might help publishers make a
little more money on their commercial works, but it's difficult to imagine a
Flaubert, a Joyce, or even a Franzen decide to alter their vision based on
some prospective sales numbers. But who knows, perhaps someone will use the
technology to create something that is both profound and accessible to a
larger audience.

~~~
redwall_hp
Good thing ebooks increasingly make publishing houses irrelevant. Write a
book, hire a copyeditor, and publish it yourself.

~~~
svenkatesh
From my experience, most self-published works are far worse in quality than
curated material.

The fact of the matter is that most self-publishers aren't willing to pony up
the money to hire content and creative editors.

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dsr_
Remove the DRM from your ebooks; convert to an open format like epub; read it
with open source software on anything you like without tracking.

If you don't do this, acknowledge that you are renting a reading experience --
and pay what that's worth to you, as opposed to the price of owning a copy of
a book.

~~~
neeee
Do you know of a good open source ebook reader?

~~~
officemonkey
Calibre is the best ebook manager. It's the iTunes for ebooks.

On Android, the FBReader.app is quite good, however you probably will want to
tweak the options to get it to look as nice as the Kindle.app looks "out of
the box."

On iOS, the Bluefire.app is the best of the unaffiliated apps, but I preferred
to open .mobi files in the Kindle.app.

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dcc1
Or just download from pirates and get high quality drm free ebooks that dont
fuck around.

~~~
svenkatesh
Yeah, everyone knows that authors make most of their money touring anyway.

Right guise?!

~~~
belorn
Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers -
[http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/03/death-
of-d...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/03/death-of-drm-good-
news) written by science fiction author Cory Doctorow

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edw519
_What writer would pass up the opportunity to peer into the reader’s mind?_

Hemingway, Faulkner, Dickens, Twain, Thoreau, Capote... (I can go on and on,
but you kinda get the idea.)

Do you honestly think that great writers ever gave a shit about what people
wanted?

Or did they just write what channeled through them?

This technology vividly demonstrates the #1 flaw of social:

WhatPeopleWant != Quality

~~~
PavlovsCat
> _Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as
> people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and
> writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have
> accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of
> entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a
> human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple
> entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while
> we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience
> what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they
> wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of
> artists to give the audience what they need._

\-- Alan Moore

How many hack writers can hustle in the non-existing wriggle room between this
and what Bill Hicks said about artists suc^H^H^Hselling out? Whenever I pull
up the analytics dashboard, it just reads "way too many".

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throwawaykf03
I've been thinking for many years about e-readers and the consequences of
tracking user reading behaviors. One likely outcome is that it will result in
a wave of "pop literature". As I understand it, pop music is already heavily
customized to appeal to the masses based on tracking loads of data, going as
far as analyzing past hits to identify the combinations of tunes, vocals,
instruments and audio effects that work best to create new hits. Record labels
and producers apparently have it down to a (data) science.

Some may point out that mass-produced "pop literature" is not really new: for
instance, the entire Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew series was just that. However,
since this is not a widespread practice so far, (almost) nobody has complained
about it.

But once this data starts getting used more and more, and feedback loops get
more efficient, eventually pop literature may suffer from the same criticisms
as pop music. In a way it's good: you're giving the customers what they want.
But it also has the downside that creators will shape themselves to their
audiences rather than express themselves freely, limiting the variety and
individuality of creative output. As long as enough creators choose the latter
at least once in a while, I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff.

However, this is just the low-hanging fruit and does not explore the full
potential of e-readers. E-readers need not just be dumb terminals that phone
home with reader behavior -- they're fully capable general-purpose computers,
and we should use them as such! We should be thinking of e-readers that
"adapt" to the reader and the material. And not just an "average reader"
profiled aggregately over an entire audience, but individual readers. Let the
authors freely express themselves, and let technology bridge the gap between
the creative work and the reader.

I haven't thought it through completely, but we certainly have the technology
-- things like NLP and machine learning and user profiling and heuristics can
go a long way in performing basic adaptive tasks. User likes short chapters
but the book has long ones? Re-segment the text to match the user's
preferences! (Maybe using a variant of text tiling.) User looking for new
reads? Recommend books based on similarity of reading behaviors! They could
even change the language based on user profiles. User too young? Tone down the
profanity! User too old? Replace "really whips the llamma's ass" with "totally
funkadelic"!

Technology is, of course, not advanced enough, so we would still rely on human
input to a great extent. Editorial staff (or other readers) would need to
provide tons of annotations and metadata that can help e-readers adapt better.

But eventually it may happen that for the same material two users may end up
having very different reading experiences.

~~~
mikecane
It will breed sequelitis, a specialty of movies. And more grave-robbing of
dead authors (see fourth _Millennium_ series book recently announced while
Stieg Larsson spins in his grave).

~~~
svenkatesh
Sequelitis is a problem in any creative industry.

TV shows do it, and video games do it too (biggest offenders are Call of Duty
and Pokémon)

~~~
mikecane
"industry" is the key word.

