Your E-Book is Reading You

Alexandra Alter's "Your E-Book is Reading You" appeared in The Wall Street Journal in 2012. In the essay Alter aims to explain to readers that publishers are compiling vast data repositories containing information on a wide array of statistics on how and what we read. He explains the possibility of using these analytics to provide a more directed approach towards the reader’s desires. "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." Enumeration, anecdotes, and a hint of propaganda are techniques the author employs to sway the reader and develop a convincing essay.

Alter opens the essay with a couple of numbers and statistics about reading speed and passages highlighted passages in a particular book. This enumeration technique immediately establishes the tone of the essay and has a “scientific” feel about it. It is an effective way to project the author’s legitimacy and gain the reader's trust that the writer has done their research and knows what they are talking about. Also, this paragraph uses an extremely popular novel named “Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins, which is the first in a trilogy, to illustrate how the data is used. “The first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first ‘Hunger Games’ book is to download the next one.”

Almost immediately after peaking the reader's curiosity with the statistics of their personal reading habits, Alter begins using anecdotes from Jim Hilt of Barnes & Noble. Quotes like "the earliest stages of deep analytics" and people that are sifting through "more data than we can use." portray databanks overflowing with personal information that companies are salivating over; looking for ways to exploit. She explains the high stakes involved in deciphering the metrics that are collected with the e-readers and although Barnes & Noble is still in "the earliest stages of deep analytics", how the information is beginning to shape how they conduct business.

At approximately a third of the way through the article, Alter transitions from anecdotes to full on propaganda mode. She begins focusing on the idea that all this data collection is very helpful to the consumer. Her points on helping the publisher “create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features”. Although the primary view portrayed by the publishers in the article would appear to be helping the reader find books that might be of interest, some might compare this to a telemarketer calling you to solicit home services because the metrics show that a person owns a house. In comparison, just because a person reads a murder mystery novel, does not mean that every murder mystery novel will appeal to that person, and publishers pushing advertisements onto the consumer while they are trying to read a novel would be intrusive at a minimum.

Midway through the article, the author begins to delve into the privacy issues that surround the data mining techniques used by the publishers. She begins by describing the Electronic Frontier Foundation “EFF” as a “Privacy Watchdog” and Quotes the EEF legal director Cindy Cohen as saying “"There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business," and “"Right now, there's no way for you to tell Amazon, I want to buy your books, but I don't want you to track what I'm reading". Alter then uses words like “Reader Privacy Act”, and “evidence to law enforcement” leaving the reader to possibly believe that everyone is constantly combing over their selection of literary choices and scrutinizing everything they read. Author and cyber security expert Bruce Schneier worry that readers may steer clear of “more sensitive and taboo subjects amid fears that their reading is being tracked”. The bottom line is that if I want to read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’, it is my business and not the business of a person looking to push advertisements and sell me products through my e-reader. (I can’t imagine what those ads would look like!)

After a quick mention of the legal rights of the reader, and some impressive numbers regarding the e-book’s revenue generating abilities, Alter returns to the propaganda like facts regarding how all of this over-watching will help the reader get so much more out of their reading experience. She explains how demographics like age, gender and school affiliation of people who purchased books is shared with publishers. Publishers can then incorporate the readers’ comments and statistics to the later print editions of the book. One might feel that this takes away from the author’s creativity and the result is just the results of what the majority of readers suggest. This style of publishing could turn out to be more like ‘American Idol’ than an expression of the author’s true vision of their work.

When reading this article, I found the need to remind myself that the author was in fact making her living in the area of publishing. I believe this is why she wrote this article in the style she did. Her alliance with publishers and authors alike are a very important piece to her livelihood and it showed through in this article. The enumeration style was clearly biased towards the industry and failed to produce any facts on how many consumers do not want this type of personal data collected. The anecdotal analysis once again reflected the opinions of authors and publishers but failed to incorporate any reader based opinions. The propaganda angle which took up a majority of the article was almost exclusively focused on the ‘big business’ side of the equation and the little bit written on the consumer concerns about privacy was downplayed by the choice of words like “Law Enforcement Agency”, and “Privacy Watchdog”. I find it very interesting that if we were to read an article on the exact same subject written by a person like Cindy Cohen who is concerned with the privacy rights of citizens, how different the look and feel would be.

References
Alter, A. (2012). Your E-book is reading you. Wall Street Journal, 29.