published Summer 2012 The Wall Street Journal published an article entitled “Your e-book is reading you” which was about the e-book and in particular e-reader “reads the reader.” More in detail described their reporter Alexandra Alter how online bookstore, with e-readers such as interfaces, collect and store detailed data about both customer buying patterns and how they read their e-books, such as how long it takes to read a page or where to do break. One aim is to improve the individualized recommendations that these customers face on nätbokhandlarnas sites, something that is increasingly important in marketing. Another is to provide publishers and authors with valuable information about how readers use text, with possible dismissal in book production. The methodology is new in the specific context but according Alters description is the e-book industry and new modus operandi is anything but unique.
large data groups with popular stamp collecting data from and about its users has since received a peculiar timeliness. But in other respects, there are reasons to illuminate phenomena that e-books and media plates from a privacy perspective. The Swedish book market facing a change by industry giant Amazon is likely preparing entrance on stage. Anyone who reads the newspaper Swedish bookstore sees periodic notice of this but also that there are ambiguities about Amazon’s ambitions. The many questions reflect structural changes but also perhaps an overly narrow interpretation of its essence. Amazon is an e-book store, a platform for self-publishing and an important discussion forum for book readers but also just a data group. Which really just makes the issues become even more.
forecasts can characterized by the aspiring author’s perspective, and there is then no doubt that the new arrangement may be promising (read Lasse Winkler’s story on Amazon here). Amazon opens up avenues of publishing and sales that might otherwise be impenetrable. In almost all advertising is otherwise the reader who is the big winner overall. A range of one million titles, low prices, fast deployment, the ability to carry an entire library with you in the e-reader Kindle or using the corresponding software for computers, smartphones and tablets – this and much more are turning to bokslukarens desires. The rhetoric is often the lure of inevitability of technological progress and of the e-bokläsningen is the definitive expression of the early 2000s efforts to reconcile consumption and mobility. OPRAH WINFREY has said he loves his Kindle and that is saying a bit in the global media market.
reader stands at the heart of one of urberättelserna e-lecture problem. It is about the signature “Ian” whose account and all e-books were detained because Amazon felt that he had complained about too many purchases and possibly violated the terms of purchase. The negative publicity forced the company to make concessions but the feeling that they had abused a customer and had the right to do that has endured. The same with the story of Justin Gawronski, the student who had purchased an e-book for a school project but one day could not find it on their Kindle. The reason was a copyright dispute that prevented Amazon from selling the current release, but this ended up in the shadows of the e-book’s actual title and the teknokulturella images it represents: “1984″ by George Orwell.
Alexandra Alter’s article in the Wall Street Journal were not just Amazon. Yet floated giant and also Orwell shadows over the statement. The reason is the large databases of book purchases and reading that one possesses – Amazon has a total of over 150 million customers – and that the model of trading with e-books have become normative in that it connects the reader to the proprietary technology. Amazon’s e-books are interactive in the sense that buyers can “write” in their own copies. But they can only be read on a Kindle or a Kindle app, a mandatory readily lends itself to discussions of power and rights.
reading requires taking the reader to accept that Amazon stores data from läsakten, including the last page you read, all your bookmarks, highlighting, notes and comments. The reader will receive in return a home to so-called social reading and can therefore choose to include in their copy to see which sections, paragraphs, or sentences that other readers have reacted to such and underlined – in addition of course to share their own reflections. This is done openly but openness characterizes otherwise layup. Amazon consider this information as “all Kindle readers collective intelligence” but give the rest to get details on how to construct this resource.
The general features, however, is known and unsurprisingly goes interpretations of them apart. The traditional publishing industry is ambivalent. On one level, it has now potentially access to invaluable information about the lecture’s own species. For example, if the reader of non-fiction tend to read sketchy. Such insight currently used primarily to optimize the recommendations bokköparen encounter in online sales but it can also affect the nature of supply. Readers fickleness – Example of the bookseller Barnes & Noble nätdivision – already affecting marketing in that it offers them more shorter books. Information on where in a particular e-book readers pauses can also do it the publisher just where can supplement or adapt the content of the new editions. Either way, the goal is that the reader will read clearly, be happy and the next moment order a new title.
On another level läsdatainsamlingen raises the concern that the book production likely to be too reactive and the authors authority decreases. The extreme example is publisher Coliloquy, whose e-books sold through Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google Play and allows readers influence the course of events and actions in the current bokserierna. The authors here, slightly pointedly, in the next contracted to correspond to the reader’s preference. It remains to be seen whether this model of the future. At present Coliloquy most interesting because it has emerged from the collaboration between a computer scientist (from Google), a video game analyst – and Amazon. For the meeting to be believed, the e-books today share technological base with both the search engines and computer games.
From this perspective seen, Amazon is a company with wide ramifications in the information technology industry. Outwardly, the printed word, although standard and CEO Jeff Bezos has stressed that it will improve rather than revolutionize the book. While different e-book clearly from the conventional book by communication between the seller and the buyer is consistent bidirectional. No one should be surprised at this. Amazon had early collection of customer data in its commercial DNA and läsdatainsamlingen is an extension of that. It is all in books and other goods but also in the information in the style of several major related parties, including Facebook and Google. Data analysis related to e-books and reading is also emerging as an industry with its own momentum where the competitive situation looks like that the more data at its disposal, the better the product.
It is at that point that the media historian Ted Striphas has directed an unexpected criticism of Amazon and reading pad technology. In his descriptions, with equally appealing as severe translated titles like “The late age of print” and “The abuses of literacy” (from 2009-2010), the reading of e-books linked directly to Amazon’s large servers and the type of information production taking place there. For this case of tethering , constant connection, he creates a right problem: Who owns the reading? Striphas hårdrar reasoning and argues that Amazon runs a form of digital slavery by forcing the reader of ebooks to perform a valuable service which never recognized. This experience has exceeded many limits in bokläsandets practice, especially those related to the reading public and useless character.
Both Alexandra Alter and Ted Striphas writing by the simplistic oppositional. The reading has not, historically, been quite so private and useless as they suggest, nor is the feedback mechanisms anything new. Nevertheless, depicting the important news: Alter the new industrial relations reshaping the literary system using multimedia technologies and ideal images, and Striphas that increasingly consumer is increasingly characterized by different types of control. The grip from the sociologist Henri Lefebvre, he describes today’s infrastructure for sales and distribution in which individual books can be positioned accurately determined. The core is the big computers that store customer and the read data and can be instructed to respond in a certain way when changes occur. The reading is here a portion of a reactive structure, which can link läsakten directly to production. The reader is then no longer a subject without an object: a source of information in a system w hose purpose is to optimize the flow.
Among readers of e-books and the users of the Kindle, there is no uniform approach to this new order. Nor is there any reliable answers to two of the most important follow-up questions: inhibited reading of transparency? What happens if the read data coming adrift? When Striphas for readers’ actions because he still his criticism far and says that they are subjected to regular monitoring of the dominant commercial players. Which also means that they are accessible to the state. The petition is available here lure of despair but also the beginnings of a civil protest. Would, for example, could abuse the technology by creating meaningless noise in the data flow? A coordinated action would show that it is not closed but open and possible to influence. Only then can the right to read in peace maintained.
protest seems distant today. In the ensuing discussion by Alexandra Alter’s article posed some readers the most brutal of questions: Who cares? It may be noted also that the stock prices – one of several measures of confidence – for the leading large-scale data storage services, Amazon among them, were not significantly affected by Edward Snowden’s revelations about electronic surveillance under government auspices. Where is the outrage then? Possibly smothered by novelty. As someone wrote, “I know it may be unethical, I know it’s an intrusion, I know it may be wrong, but my lord creator which cool insights you get.”
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