E-Book Apps Collect Data on Reader Habits: Helpful Tool or Invasion of Privacy?
By Dennis Kuba
July 2, 2012
July 2, 2012
E-book apps from Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble track reader behavior and pass that information back to be analyzed as an aggregated data pool.- The apps can determine how much time readers spend with a book, where they lose interest, which search terms they use to find books, which sentences they highlight, and much more.
- Barnes & Noble, for example, found “nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts, while novels are generally read straight through, and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start.”
- “The bigger trend we’re trying to unearth is where are those drop-offs in certain kinds of books, and what can we do with publishers to prevent that? If we can help authors create even better books than they create today, it’s a win for everybody,” explains Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble VP of E-Books.
- Still, some publishers are skeptical about using the data. “The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn’t have anything to do with,” says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “We’re not going to shorten ‘War and Peace’ because someone didn’t finish it.”
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation working with the ACLU has argued that people’s reading habits should be private. They are lobbying states to enact privacy provisions as California has done.
- There is one company that has taken this approach to an extreme. Coliloquy is not only gathering reader data to help authors craft their works to best fit reader interests and behavior; it uses a proprietary data platform that allows readers choose from different paths through the story.
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