Someone is watching you
Despite efforts by Amazon, Google and Apple to keep the topic out of the spotlight as much as possible, the issue of tracking of the habits di reading and confidentiality of those who buy eBooks ended up in first floor thanks to an outsider, Kobo.
The Japanese-Canadian company (bought a few years ago from Rakuten, one of the world's leading giants in the field of e-commerce, together with eBay and Amazon), producer of electronic books and digital media, has registered, elaborate and finally published a substantial mass of data collected on behavior of the readers: at what point they decided to abandon a book, at what speed they read it, on which pages they lingered, which passivated have highlighted o shared.
Not to mention that companies like Kobo are aware of passwords, telephone numbers and a whole series of private information that readers often do not realize they are making available (including geolocation), due to the "hermetic" language of pages concerning the conditions of sale and the processing of personal data.
Through the 'ePub3, the standard open most popular among manufacturers of eBook, it's just not possible to monitor le actions of users, but also register them e archive in full compliance with the law. As a result, the technology companies they exploit the best potentiality of the format for improve theoffering of products and services, also having the possibility to choose with greater knowledge the books to publish and the promotion strategies to implement. Amazon, in particular, benefits immensely from free access to data, as the company not only sells books, but now also publishes them.
Bought! Only half bed
Beyond the privacy issue, fromsurvey of Kobo, conducted on 21 million of users, it emerged that they are often the sales champions to get the percentages di completion more disappointing, while many "mid list” (middle-ranked titles) manage to excite readers up to thelast page of the book. Typically customers are led to think that the fame of a book both directly proportional to its quality, but then they are forced a set it aside because they realize that genre is not for them or that it is too heavy reading.
Then there is a category of people who buy books of a certain thickness (better if internationally awarded) just to indulge the whim of host them of own library, while not being able to complete them, although, in fact, Kobo's statistics only concern electronic books and not paper ones.
Does tracking inhibit?
As regards the issue of confidentiality, it is clear that theassenza di restrizioni on tracking of reading habits can become source great inhibition for the reader. THE books always have been perceived like a refuge, one space of freedom, the "place" where you can think as you want and above all what you want. Without go so far as to prefigure Orwellian scenarios in which one risks being punished or suffering severe limitations of freedom of thought, through the fault of subjects devoted to social control, is sufficient to imagine theembarrassment of a fan of Fifty Shades in learning that someone is ready to reason on the pages he read and reread more willingly.
So once again, i pros and against the technological development end up on balance and many would be ready to appreciate the advantages, if all these information they didn't risk being used improperly, to create more compelling content and created "ad hoc", content identified by an algorithm in order to meet the expectations of the public that emerged from the surveys.
Many authors they may be forced to twist theirs style or worse to "lower the level” to adapt to the literary taste “calculated” by the algorithms, destined to compromise its individual personalities and artistic individualities. After all, as the American publisher Jonathan Galassi (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) points out, “you can't shorten War and peace just because people can't finish it."
Let us console ourselves, however, it is the Italians, generally rather low in the world classics who trace socially positive behaviour, the readers who carry on reading an ebook further. Only the French surpass us, but we already know that the French are always the first in the class in cultural matters.
