Tuesday, September 20, 2016

The transparent reader


from Wired Magazine
"Once, publishers had to rely on unit sales to figure out what readers wanted. Digital reading changed that. Publishers can know that you raced through a novel to the end, or that you abandoned it after twenty pages. They can know where and when you’re reading. There’s a wrinkle, though... companies such as Amazon and Apple have the data for books read on their devices, and they aren’t sharing it with publishers. 

London-based startup Jellybooks  conducts virtual focus groups, giving readers free ebooks, often in advance of publication, in exchange for their sharing data on how much, when, and where they read. In almost two years, the company has run tests for publishers in the United States, England and Germany, and uncovered one sobering fact... most novels are abandoned before readers are halfway through them."

I guess that makes me an exception, having to the best of my knowledge only twice having failed to read a book to the end. I don't think any of my own novels have suffered this ignominious fate... after all, they are mostly not even started!

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