Tracking Your Reading Habits

“For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page.”
-         WSJ article

e-Book readers like the Kindle and other reader apps on the iPad and Android can and do track how you read. Whether you read the acknowledgments or skip it. Do you read the book at one sitting or multiple sittings? Did you finish reading the book or did you drop off in the middle? And if you dropped off, was it after the first few pages or half-way into it?

All this data is then shared with publishers who assess which styles hold the reader’s attention. They help identify which points make a book boring and cause drop offs. The publishers in turn pass that feedback on to authors.

Another feature of e-book readers is that they allow readers to highlight passages they like. Or to add their own comments. Amazon even lists the most highlighted parts of books on their site. This is a far better metric than asking a critic which parts to highlight/project as part of advertising campaigns.

If you’re worried about privacy, it’s a mixed bag: some of these sites and apps only give consolidated data to publishers so that individual readers cannot be identified. Whereas others make no such promise. Of course, many readers do not like the idea of someone out there knowing what they read, and no, it’s not just porn related! People are not too keen that others know they were reading about particular health issues or divorce…you get the idea.

Some publishers collect such feedback on the electronic version of a book, incorporate it and only then release the printed version of the book. Others allow readers of the electronic version to pick the style-of-adventure they want; thus identifying which styles are more popular and then decide to publish more of the same type.

Of course, there are some who criticize this feedback loop and say that books are supposed to be written the way the author feels. “We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it”, says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Then again, publishers (and most writers) are in it for the money. So I am guessing the majority would want such feedback. And since most readers read for pleasure, they would welcome more books written the way they like things. So, like it or not, I feel this trend of tracking how you read is here to stay.

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