Believe it or not, your reading habits are being monitored by the iPad you’re holding in your hand. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the e-book industry is studying what people read and how they read it. They want to know if you skim intros, skip chapters, which ones are your favourites passages and other stuff like that.
This is hardcore data mining, used to developer future e-book technology. One example of data collection and user averages they came up is this: the average reader takes about 7 hours to read the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy on the Kobo e-reader. This means 57 pages per hour and about 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book of the series, while on the B&N Nook the first thing users do after finishing one of the Hunger Games books is moving on to another one and downloading it.
Thus, you can establish a pattern here and draw the public further to more appealing titles similar to that one. Obviously, there’s the privacy aspect and I’m sure not many of you are happy knowing that the big publishers are snooping around your reading habits. The EFF, a consumer rights and privacy advocacy group is trying to get legislation to stop e-book bigshots from using your reading data. Will they succeed? We’ll see…
