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By Paul Biba

images.jpegGot this email from Bruce Wilson who asks an absolutely fascinating question. For those who might not know the basis of this question, if you have a Kindle and an iPhone, and read books on both, Amazon will sync the Kindle to your last read place on your iPhone and vice versa.

Hi Paul. I have some questions, and I’m thinking it will take someone with some Amazon connections to find the answers. I’ve never seen this question answered, or even asked, before.

So, a feature of the Amazon’s Whispernet service is to sync your reading info between devices. The Kindle License agreement says they collect this sync data, so Amazon pretty much knows how fast you progress through different books, how often you switch between books, which passages draw your attention the best (read in one sitting), how much we read in a day, which books are read in one sitting, and which are read piecemeal–an unprecedented view of the reading habits of a couple million people. Some of this info might be inferred by a library circulation desk, but not anywhere near the detail Amazon gets.

My question is, what is Amazon doing with this data? I don’t see any customization on the Kindle Books home page, no lists of books recommended by (or similar to) other readers who read the way I do, nothing. I think they are sitting on a little gold mine of info, and they don’t appear to be mining it. But I don’t actually believe that they would ignore it.

Seeing how Amazon operates, I doubt we will ever get an answer to this question, but if we start seeing some unusual new data-related features appear on the Amazon site we might now have a clue as to where they came from.

 
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