Your E-Book Is Reading You
This article from the Wall St. Journal [June 29 2012] is a important since it summarizes some of the stuff that digital book publishers and retailers now know about our readers’ reading habits. It has the potential impacts of driving advertising, as well as the choices that authors, readers and publishers make. It is truly fascinating!
Your E-Book Is Reading You
Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about their readers than
ever before. How that’s changing the experience of reading.
“It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader—about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one. In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.
Stephen
A very interesting story. For obvious reasons, eBook vendors and other content aggregators should be willing to share user behavior metrics with the publishing houses and independent authors who developed the content in the first place.