In the Wall Street Journal Alexandra Alter reports on: 'Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about their readers than ever before. How that's changing the experience of reading' in Your E-Book Is Reading You.
She notes:
She notes:
Publishing has lagged far behind the rest of the entertainment industry when it comes to measuring consumers' tastes and habits. TV producers relentlessly test new shows through focus groups; movie studios run films through a battery of tests and retool them based on viewers' reactions. But in publishing, reader satisfaction has largely been gauged by sales data and reviews -- metrics that offer a postmortem measure of success but can't shape or predict a hit. That's beginning to change as publishers and booksellers start to embrace big data, and more tech companies turn their sights on publishing.Fascinating though that data might be, I must say I'm pleased that my e-reader is not Wi-Fi, 3G, or otherwise data-collecting-and-passing-on enabled .....