From this morning’s issue of Shelf Awareness:
In response to our link on Friday to an NPR story on the ability of companies to track the behavior and habits of people using e-readers, Lucy Kogler of Talking Leaves, Buffalo, N.Y., and president of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, wrote:
I was outraged by publisher consultant Brian O’Leary’s statement that “if people are buying books but not reading them or they’re quitting them after a short period of time, that ultimately tells you that the customer is dissatisfied…and that better understanding when people stop reading, engaging with your content would help you create a better product.”
There are so many things wrong with his statement. Books are not product. Books are creative endeavors as individual and singular as any work of art. They cannot be tweaked as if they are idling wrong. They can’t have leaves pulled off as they rot like a cabbage or lettuce.
How many of us have piles of books on our nightstands because when we started one or another, it just wasn’t the right time? If publishers follow O’Leary’s precepts, the outcome will be homogenization of content.
The story mentioned, too, that e-reader users can be tracked geographically. The e-reader as spy satellite is a perverse outcome of the Bush years, when citizens became inured to rights and privacy violations. Citizens have allowed governmental interference to extend to corporate interference. And government has started treating corporations as people. Publishing should be the very industry fighting to preserve free speech and the creative process. Thank God for organizations like PEN and Words Without Borders. The writers and publishers involved understand that our intellectual future depends on difference.
I have two thoughts. I will address the privacy concerns first.
Equating corporate spying on customer behavior with the Bush Years show yet again how little many in the publishing industry understand computers or the internet. Cookies have been part of web pages since the mid 1990s, and even before then, you can be sure that ISPs and web sites tried to monitor user behavior to gain marketing information that could be used to court advertisers. Ebook readers are essentially just special purpose computers so it is no wonder that some of them allow the book seller to get information about who buys it, and how they read it. Is it something to be happy about? No, but the whole concept goes back a lot further than the Bush years.
Now regarding Ms. Kogler’s outrage at the notion that books should be treated as product as opposed to individual works of art. Her attitude, despite her position as head of a Book Seller’s organization, if shared by enough of her peers in the Book industry, might explain why so many Book Sellers are going out of business.
Yes, books can be art, some books; the vast majority are not. Further, very few books (except maybe self published books) are published without tweaking. Many authors share their works with other authors as well as close friends and family, seeking feedback to help them improve their work. Once sent to the publisher, it will go through editing, again to make the book more readable and also marketable.
This attitude of treating books solely as art might explain why publishers often spend millions to publish Literary Novels that are frequently praised but infrequently sold or read– all the while genre novels and media tie-in books make their publishers tons of money.
“better understanding when people stop reading, engaging with your content would help you create a better product.”
So wrong in so many ways!
Shelf Awareness says: “There are so many things wrong with his statement. Books are not product. Books are creative endeavors as individual and singular as any work of art”
So right, in so many ways!
I don’t particularly care for the works of PIcasso, but what would the world be missing if we had asked him to tweak his work to make it more widely acceptable?
I have managed to force my way through only one book by DH Lawrence, but I certainly defend his inclusion in the ranks of fine literature.
Art is personal–a personal achievement, a personal statement, a result created by an individual’s thoughts and vision–no matter if the art in question is a painting, a sculpture, a symphony or a book.
Writing is an art, not something developed in a lab by a committee seeking to appease everyone.
@Lenne:
First, the reaction to what I said to NPR is written by Lucy Kogler. It appeared in Shelf Awareness, but it was not written by Shelf Awareness. It’s the equivalent of a letter to the editor.
Both you and Ms. Kogler appear to make the leap from “what might data tell you?” to “homogenization of content” in a single bound. Let’s go the other way. I propose we eliminate any use of data in publishing: no sales figures, no Bookscan rankings, no best-seller lists, no reviews. Let’s not tell booksellers anything about a book; they should all be expected to read every book and use that as the basis for deciding what books they will sell.
Isn’t that absurd?
We use data now for all sorts of decisions. In significant detail, Google Analytics tells me what people who come to my blog are reading, what they are not reading, what they are reading when they decide to leave, where they enter, how long they spend reading posts, who comes back, how often they come back .. etc. etc. etc.
The number of people who have read my most popular posts is 100 times greater than those who have read my least popular ones. I could use that data to try writing only on topics that are widely read, but … I don’t. I write what interests me, and I think about what I might do to make what interests me more interesting to people who otherwise would skip over or leave a post early.
The real tyranny is not considering data at all. Picasso was more than willing to take Chester Dale’s patronage and feedback. Picasso still created great work.
The statement by this Ms Kogler makes me fear for the future of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association even more than I would have. She sounds like she is in need of an aluminium hat, never mind a lesson in economics and commercialism.
I wouldn’t want corporate analysts coming into my pantry and shaking my cereal boxes to see which ones my family likes best. I certainly don’t want the publishing industry (or the government, or anyone else) spying on my reading habits.
“The real tyranny is not considering data at all.” I disagree. The real tyranny is snooping into every aspect of consumers’ lives, eroding our Constitutional right to privacy bit by bit before people even realize it’s gone. Just because data can be collected doesn’t mean that every kind of data out there should be collected.
@Nancy
I agree that privacy deserves primary consideration. That topic was covered pretty well in Martin Kaste’s piece on NPR. When he interviewed me, he asked specifically if there was any upside to the use of data we already collect around e-reading.
I didn’t suggest that we collect more data. I answered a question about the use of data we already collect as part of the way we manage cloud-based services that support reading across multiple devices.
When I wrote that “the real tyranny is not considering data at all”, I was responding to Kogler’s claim (echoed by Lenne’s) that data would result in the “homogenization of content”. With respect to what gets published, I don’t think that the mere presence of data drives a result; it’s what you do with the data that matters.
If collected data impinges on your privacy, it shouldn’t be collected or you should be able to clearly understand what information is collected and opt out if you object. Take a look at a recent blog post (http://bit.ly/fUPdzV), particularly my response to a comment, for a sense of how much we probably agree.