5 ms·

Hiptype (YC S12) Launches A Google Analytics-Style Service For E-Books

90 points by sohailprasad 14y ago

2arrs2ells 14y ago
Congrats James & Sohail!
- jameslevy 14y ago
  Thanks! It's incredibly exciting for us to finally share Hiptype with the world and start getting more authors and publishers using the product. We've been particularly interested with what the HN crowd would think about things made possible with Hiptype, like A/B testing or beta testing versions of a book.
  - tstegart 14y ago
    Could this work in a hybrid app for iOS? Specifically, we publish a hybrid iPad app using an open source framework called Baker (http://bakerframework.com/ http://bakerframework.com/). I know a lot of people publish books using it as well. Only problem is, Google Analytics doesn't track HTML pageviews inside an app, and most in-app analytics are geared towards native apps. Setting up analytics is painful.
    - jameslevy 14y ago
      We might be able to help, even if we don't currently support this environment. Feel free to get in touch at james@hiptype.com
adeejay 14y ago
Congrats guys! Analytics for books. This is such a great idea...I'd thought it would have already been created. Good luck at Demo Day.
sabalaba 14y ago
Grats on the launch guys
flexie 14y ago
How do they determine the income of the readers?
- jameslevy 14y ago
  This is a good question. None of this data is available from the book itself. We've invested a lot of effort into our analytics backend, and our ability to derive demographics info from a very small amount of uniquely identifying information on the eReader or multi-purpose device. There are a few reasons why we're not explaining how we get all of the demographics and insights data shown on our dashboard, but we can vouch 100% for its accuracy, and it's all data that is publicly available.
  - tstegart 14y ago
    How does the developer get your code inside their book? Also, you might want to consider an intermediate plan. We're over 1000 readers (after a few months), but I'm guessing we're years away from 500,000 readers.
    - jameslevy 14y ago
      Adding our plugin to books is easy - you just upload the book file (using filepicker.io from our batch) and it is automatically modified to include the plugin. Also, thanks for the feedback about pricing! We're looking into some changes that would address your concerns.
      - tstegart 14y ago
        I'm guessing this info isn't on the website because you haven't got around to it yet, but knowing how things work is what attracts me to services. I'm wary of companies that claim to do things but don't say how it works, so you should consider putting up a "How-it-works" page. Do you have a list of supported formats? Just another comment about the pricing, 500,000 is a LOT of readers. Very few indie publishers (at least single authors) are near that number for a single book. Having a range for authors between 5,000 - 100,000 might be a better sweet spot.
smoody 14y ago
Of the companies I've read about so far, I believe this is the one to watch. I'm expecting this to be a big deal (I don't know the founders or anyone else even remotely involved). If they can get the right deals (be where authors sell the books and readers read the books), then writers will quickly become addicted to this service.
mitjak 14y ago
Ok, the "Hip{something}" naming madness has to stop.
StavrosK 14y ago
Hmm, I visited the site, but it appears you haven't actually launched? It asks me for my email to register for an invitation.
- jameslevy 14y ago
  We're inviting users in weekly batches. We're using a fifo system so signing up earlier guarantees earlier entry. We appreciate your patience, and you can get in touch directly if you'd like us to get your account activated more quickly.
tseabrooks 14y ago
I expect to be a lone voice in a sea of positivity... The very notion of A/B testing a piece of art disturbs me profoundly. The idea that publishers would say, "Our analytics show readers engage with these types of passages so you need to increase your usage of X passages by 50% and use 50% more words from this list", paints a fairly dim view of the future of artistic expression in a world that is concerned with profitability over substance at an increasing rate. Publishers already have a far heavier hand than I'd like them to or most people know about. Giving middle manager types data when it comes to artwork can only lead to place where self expression through authorship becomes a dead art-form.
- danso 14y ago
  For fiction and other works intended to be purely art, sure. But for technical, explanatory books...seems like better analytics could be a huge boon.
  - tstegart 14y ago
    I agree. If people skip to a section of a coding book all the time, an author could decide it needs expansion or might base a whole other title on the subject.
- tstegart 14y ago
  You might just be A/B testing your samples or your jacket text. I'm guessing a lot of authors would agree with you that they don't want to change specific passages in their stories. But I see a lot of them working on making their sales better by providing better blurbs. It's the equivalent of being able to change your outside back cover text to get people more interested.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- jameslevy 14y ago
  We find it very fascinating that people either love Hiptype or are profoundly disturbed. What we're doing is not different than what occurs on the websites and mobile apps you already use, so the difference is one of culture. What I'm most curious about is the extent to which these cultural norms will shift as it becomes more common for books to contain analytics like ours.
jaysonelliot 14y ago
I'm just trying to imagine how a book like Catcher in the Rye, Finnegans Wake, or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been changed if it were subjected to these sort of analytics by its publisher. I can easily see future books being edited and re-written from edition to edition (not that "edition" will continue to have any meaning) in response to analytics on reader behavior. 30% of readers failing to finish a book, and dropping off near the same place? Let's rewrite that chapter to keep people turning the pages. Lots of people highlighting a controversial passage, then not buying any more books from that author? Tone it down, smooth out the "problem areas." A surprising number of young women reading a particular book? Let's "pink it up" and throw in some romantic subplots that tested well in focus groups. How about embedding some multimedia into the book, and some product placement while we're at it? Literature will survive this latest attempt to measure the creativity right out of an industry. Good movies still make it on the indie circuit despite the focus-grouped blockbusters, good games still get made by small shops. I just can't help but feel a tinge of sadness as I watch books and literature get consumed by obsessive measurement and cold-blooded analytics.
- jameslevy 14y ago
  Jayson, thanks for your feedback. You raise an important issue. A huge proportion of the eBooks downloaded are educational, trade, and reference. Cookbooks, for example, are incredibly popular and these "cold-blood analytics" can be very practical for determining what content is working and what content is not engaging readers. It gets more tricky when it comes to literary fiction. But I think it's safe to say that measurement and creativity aren't mutually exclusive. Measuring something in and of itself doesn't compel you to make changes. But it would be interesting for us to do some research by getting into an edition of a classic text and seeing what types of changes our analytics would suggest making. This would mostly be an exercise in figuring out how to improve our analytics, rather than taking it at face-value that a classic text should be edited based on some data points.
- krickle 14y ago
  I feel your pain, but look at it this way; there were plenty of crap books before this idea as well, the silver lining is maybe having more enticing crap books will eventually lead people down the path to good literature.
noelwelsh 14y ago
A great idea but there is no information on their site about what data you actually get. Maybe innumerate literature types don't care, but us data heads certainly do. I would want to know what sections people read, what they don't, and critically I want to know what the distribution looks like, not just the mean.
sheff 14y ago
I hope they allow a mechanism for people to opt out. I can't really see this helping the reader, or even proper publishers. It will just aid the Demand Media equivalents of the publishing world in churning out crap.
- jameslevy 14y ago
  There is a privacy notice in every book with Hiptype that allows readers to opt-out. We want to make sure that we make it easy for readers who do not want their anonymous usage statistics tracked to disable Hiptype.
kirillzubovsky 14y ago
Great service and I am really looking forward to see where it goes. When I am ready to write a book, I am going to use Hiptype, no doubt. Will you let me do all the writing+publishing on Hiptype too? That would be really nice!
pasbesoin 14y ago
Analytics. Another reason to use alternative channels. (As for anononymization, as they say in security communities, once you create a means of access, who knows how and by whom it will end up being used?) I'm glad to see someone from the business actively participating here; however, I remain unassured, in the larger context and perhaps also specifically.
hammock 14y ago
I find it interesting that they call themselves the "Google Analytics for e-books" since, while it is true that often the out-of-the-box analytics offered by big publishers is extraordinarily basic (number of downloads, number of opens), the one I have worked with - Adobe DPS, used by Conde Nast and others - does allow you to directly bolt on Google Analytics to your publications, in addition to their own Omniture offering.

90 points by sohailprasad 14y ago

2arrs2ells 14y ago

Congrats James & Sohail!

jameslevy 14y ago
Thanks! It's incredibly exciting for us to finally share Hiptype with the world and start getting more authors and publishers using the product. We've been particularly interested with what the HN crowd would think about things made possible with Hiptype, like A/B testing or beta testing versions of a book.
- tstegart 14y ago
  Could this work in a hybrid app for iOS? Specifically, we publish a hybrid iPad app using an open source framework called Baker (http://bakerframework.com/ http://bakerframework.com/). I know a lot of people publish books using it as well. Only problem is, Google Analytics doesn't track HTML pageviews inside an app, and most in-app analytics are geared towards native apps. Setting up analytics is painful.
  - jameslevy 14y ago
    We might be able to help, even if we don't currently support this environment. Feel free to get in touch at james@hiptype.com

adeejay 14y ago

Congrats guys! Analytics for books. This is such a great idea...I'd thought it would have already been created. Good luck at Demo Day.

sabalaba 14y ago

Grats on the launch guys

flexie 14y ago

How do they determine the income of the readers?

jameslevy 14y ago
This is a good question. None of this data is available from the book itself. We've invested a lot of effort into our analytics backend, and our ability to derive demographics info from a very small amount of uniquely identifying information on the eReader or multi-purpose device. There are a few reasons why we're not explaining how we get all of the demographics and insights data shown on our dashboard, but we can vouch 100% for its accuracy, and it's all data that is publicly available.
- tstegart 14y ago
  How does the developer get your code inside their book? Also, you might want to consider an intermediate plan. We're over 1000 readers (after a few months), but I'm guessing we're years away from 500,000 readers.
  - jameslevy 14y ago
    Adding our plugin to books is easy - you just upload the book file (using filepicker.io from our batch) and it is automatically modified to include the plugin. Also, thanks for the feedback about pricing! We're looking into some changes that would address your concerns.
    - tstegart 14y ago
      I'm guessing this info isn't on the website because you haven't got around to it yet, but knowing how things work is what attracts me to services. I'm wary of companies that claim to do things but don't say how it works, so you should consider putting up a "How-it-works" page. Do you have a list of supported formats? Just another comment about the pricing, 500,000 is a LOT of readers. Very few indie publishers (at least single authors) are near that number for a single book. Having a range for authors between 5,000 - 100,000 might be a better sweet spot.

smoody 14y ago

Of the companies I've read about so far, I believe this is the one to watch. I'm expecting this to be a big deal (I don't know the founders or anyone else even remotely involved). If they can get the right deals (be where authors sell the books and readers read the books), then writers will quickly become addicted to this service.

mitjak 14y ago

Ok, the "Hip{something}" naming madness has to stop.

StavrosK 14y ago

Hmm, I visited the site, but it appears you haven't actually launched? It asks me for my email to register for an invitation.

jameslevy 14y ago
We're inviting users in weekly batches. We're using a fifo system so signing up earlier guarantees earlier entry. We appreciate your patience, and you can get in touch directly if you'd like us to get your account activated more quickly.

tseabrooks 14y ago

I expect to be a lone voice in a sea of positivity... The very notion of A/B testing a piece of art disturbs me profoundly. The idea that publishers would say, "Our analytics show readers engage with these types of passages so you need to increase your usage of X passages by 50% and use 50% more words from this list", paints a fairly dim view of the future of artistic expression in a world that is concerned with profitability over substance at an increasing rate. Publishers already have a far heavier hand than I'd like them to or most people know about. Giving middle manager types data when it comes to artwork can only lead to place where self expression through authorship becomes a dead art-form.

danso 14y ago
For fiction and other works intended to be purely art, sure. But for technical, explanatory books...seems like better analytics could be a huge boon.
- tstegart 14y ago
  I agree. If people skip to a section of a coding book all the time, an author could decide it needs expansion or might base a whole other title on the subject.
tstegart 14y ago
You might just be A/B testing your samples or your jacket text. I'm guessing a lot of authors would agree with you that they don't want to change specific passages in their stories. But I see a lot of them working on making their sales better by providing better blurbs. It's the equivalent of being able to change your outside back cover text to get people more interested.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
jameslevy 14y ago
We find it very fascinating that people either love Hiptype or are profoundly disturbed. What we're doing is not different than what occurs on the websites and mobile apps you already use, so the difference is one of culture. What I'm most curious about is the extent to which these cultural norms will shift as it becomes more common for books to contain analytics like ours.

jaysonelliot 14y ago

I'm just trying to imagine how a book like Catcher in the Rye, Finnegans Wake, or To Kill a Mockingbird would have been changed if it were subjected to these sort of analytics by its publisher. I can easily see future books being edited and re-written from edition to edition (not that "edition" will continue to have any meaning) in response to analytics on reader behavior. 30% of readers failing to finish a book, and dropping off near the same place? Let's rewrite that chapter to keep people turning the pages. Lots of people highlighting a controversial passage, then not buying any more books from that author? Tone it down, smooth out the "problem areas." A surprising number of young women reading a particular book? Let's "pink it up" and throw in some romantic subplots that tested well in focus groups. How about embedding some multimedia into the book, and some product placement while we're at it? Literature will survive this latest attempt to measure the creativity right out of an industry. Good movies still make it on the indie circuit despite the focus-grouped blockbusters, good games still get made by small shops. I just can't help but feel a tinge of sadness as I watch books and literature get consumed by obsessive measurement and cold-blooded analytics.

jameslevy 14y ago
Jayson, thanks for your feedback. You raise an important issue. A huge proportion of the eBooks downloaded are educational, trade, and reference. Cookbooks, for example, are incredibly popular and these "cold-blood analytics" can be very practical for determining what content is working and what content is not engaging readers. It gets more tricky when it comes to literary fiction. But I think it's safe to say that measurement and creativity aren't mutually exclusive. Measuring something in and of itself doesn't compel you to make changes. But it would be interesting for us to do some research by getting into an edition of a classic text and seeing what types of changes our analytics would suggest making. This would mostly be an exercise in figuring out how to improve our analytics, rather than taking it at face-value that a classic text should be edited based on some data points.
krickle 14y ago
I feel your pain, but look at it this way; there were plenty of crap books before this idea as well, the silver lining is maybe having more enticing crap books will eventually lead people down the path to good literature.

noelwelsh 14y ago

A great idea but there is no information on their site about what data you actually get. Maybe innumerate literature types don't care, but us data heads certainly do. I would want to know what sections people read, what they don't, and critically I want to know what the distribution looks like, not just the mean.

sheff 14y ago

I hope they allow a mechanism for people to opt out. I can't really see this helping the reader, or even proper publishers. It will just aid the Demand Media equivalents of the publishing world in churning out crap.

jameslevy 14y ago
There is a privacy notice in every book with Hiptype that allows readers to opt-out. We want to make sure that we make it easy for readers who do not want their anonymous usage statistics tracked to disable Hiptype.

kirillzubovsky 14y ago

Great service and I am really looking forward to see where it goes. When I am ready to write a book, I am going to use Hiptype, no doubt. Will you let me do all the writing+publishing on Hiptype too? That would be really nice!

pasbesoin 14y ago

Analytics. Another reason to use alternative channels. (As for anononymization, as they say in security communities, once you create a means of access, who knows how and by whom it will end up being used?) I'm glad to see someone from the business actively participating here; however, I remain unassured, in the larger context and perhaps also specifically.

hammock 14y ago

I find it interesting that they call themselves the "Google Analytics for e-books" since, while it is true that often the out-of-the-box analytics offered by big publishers is extraordinarily basic (number of downloads, number of opens), the one I have worked with - Adobe DPS, used by Conde Nast and others - does allow you to directly bolt on Google Analytics to your publications, in addition to their own Omniture offering.