4 ms·

As New Services Track Habits, the E-Books Are Reading You

45 points by RougeFemme 13y ago

throwawaykf03 13y ago
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.
- eurleif 13y ago
  >However, since this is not a widespread practice so far, (almost) nobody has complained about it. You haven't seen people complain about Twilight, or Fifty Shades of Grey?
  - throwawaykf03 13y ago
    Not sure about the latter, but my impression of the Twilight series was that it's just bad writing rather than being too formulaic, like Hardy Boys or romance novels are. Now the same author may churn out book after book which seem pretty repetitive, but that may be because it's their own style. That is, their works may certainly be formulaic, but at least it's their own formula. So what I meant by the comparison with pop music is, the criticism is not just that the same artist puts out albums that sound like their previous ones, but rather that all artists start to sound like each other. And that is what I fear may happen with "pop lit": in the quest to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, all authors may end up sounding like each other.
- mikecane 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      "industry" is the key word.
moondowner 13y ago
> "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 13y ago
  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.
dcc1 13y ago
Or just download from pirates and get high quality drm free ebooks that dont fuck around.
- svenkatesh 13y ago
  Yeah, everyone knows that authors make most of their money touring anyway. Right guise?!
  - TeMPOraL 13y ago
    No, but they might learn something and start pushing publishers to go away with all that DRM and spying crap.
  - belorn 13y ago
    Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/03/death-of-drm-good-news http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/03/death-of-d... written by science fiction author Cory Doctorow
nswanberg 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Good thing ebooks increasingly make publishing houses irrelevant. Write a book, hire a copyeditor, and publish it yourself.
  - svenkatesh 13y ago
    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.
- Nursie 13y ago
  I don't know of anything specifically to do that, but you can get shell access to various kindle models (I have a Kindle Touch) and it does do some calculations (11 minutes left in chapter) so it might be worth having a poke around its file system.
- mikecane 13y ago
  See Kobo's Reading Life: http://www.kobobooks.com/stats http://www.kobobooks.com/stats
dsr_ 13y ago
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 13y ago
  Do you know of a good open source ebook reader?
  - NoahTheDuke 13y ago
    Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/ http://calibre-ebook.com/
  - officemonkey 13y ago
    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.
- mikecane 13y ago
  >>>Remove the DRM from your ebooks You've missed the point. Something like a Scribd or Oyster subscription use an app and its own eBook format. The books are cached or streamed, not downloaded permanently. You are paying to read, not to own.
edw519 13y ago
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 13y ago
  > 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".

45 points by RougeFemme 13y ago

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.

eurleif 13y ago
>However, since this is not a widespread practice so far, (almost) nobody has complained about it. You haven't seen people complain about Twilight, or Fifty Shades of Grey?
- throwawaykf03 13y ago
  Not sure about the latter, but my impression of the Twilight series was that it's just bad writing rather than being too formulaic, like Hardy Boys or romance novels are. Now the same author may churn out book after book which seem pretty repetitive, but that may be because it's their own style. That is, their works may certainly be formulaic, but at least it's their own formula. So what I meant by the comparison with pop music is, the criticism is not just that the same artist puts out albums that sound like their previous ones, but rather that all artists start to sound like each other. And that is what I fear may happen with "pop lit": in the quest to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, all authors may end up sounding like each other.
mikecane 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    "industry" is the key word.

moondowner 13y ago

> "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 13y ago
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.

dcc1 13y ago

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

svenkatesh 13y ago
Yeah, everyone knows that authors make most of their money touring anyway. Right guise?!
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  No, but they might learn something and start pushing publishers to go away with all that DRM and spying crap.
- belorn 13y ago
  Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers - http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/03/death-of-drm-good-news http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/may/03/death-of-d... written by science fiction author Cory Doctorow

nswanberg 13y ago

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 13y ago
Good thing ebooks increasingly make publishing houses irrelevant. Write a book, hire a copyeditor, and publish it yourself.
- svenkatesh 13y ago
  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.
Nursie 13y ago
I don't know of anything specifically to do that, but you can get shell access to various kindle models (I have a Kindle Touch) and it does do some calculations (11 minutes left in chapter) so it might be worth having a poke around its file system.
mikecane 13y ago
See Kobo's Reading Life: http://www.kobobooks.com/stats http://www.kobobooks.com/stats

dsr_ 13y ago

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 13y ago
Do you know of a good open source ebook reader?
- NoahTheDuke 13y ago
  Calibre: http://calibre-ebook.com/ http://calibre-ebook.com/
- officemonkey 13y ago
  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.
mikecane 13y ago
>>>Remove the DRM from your ebooks You've missed the point. Something like a Scribd or Oyster subscription use an app and its own eBook format. The books are cached or streamed, not downloaded permanently. You are paying to read, not to own.

edw519 13y ago

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 13y ago
> 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".