Why e-readers could lead to the death of literature

By Cassie Byrnes
That private moment between you and your ebook whether it is in bed, at the beach, on the train or even on the toilet is no longer solitary. It has become quite public.

Fifty Shades of Grey: grey sneakers, grey laptop, grey pants…

It is being shared with authors, publishers, advertisers and multinational companies.

They know what you’re reading, when you’re reading it and what quotes you happen to highlight. Even the battery life is accessible information. Previously publishers and authors were not privy to our intimate reading habits. Books were the last frontier left to conquer by advertisers. Now they know everything. They know your reading habits better than you do.

Many readers are surprised when learning that their e-readers are actually reading them. There has been recent outrage in the UK and US about this breach in privacy. Many have taken to Twitter to voice their frustrations.

It is not surprising e-readers have this function in this day and age. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is keeping an eye on e-reader privacy.

So how will all this information be used?

We are all creatures of habit. Statisticians are able to read our personal algorithms without us even knowing. They are cracking our habit codes and selling the secrets to advertising companies.

A New York Times article How Companies Learn Your Secrets explored how statisticians are able to decipher our buying habits to create flawless advertising strategies. Statistician Andrew Pole was employed by Target to find out if female customers were pregnant, based purely on their purchasing habits.

Pole was so successful that he was able to figure out when a woman was in her second trimester. By deciphering what items women bought and when they bought it, Pole was able to send them timely advertising material full of bottles, bibs and baby formula. Kaching!

The same now is happening with our e-readers. When the information is sent back to e-book publishing headquarters, they use it to create individually targeted and strategic advertising campaigns to sell books.

No one is saying that direct marketing is an inherently wonderful thing. But if advertisers are able to give us a gentle nudge about a product which directly suits our interests, or which closely replicates a product we’ve already bought, that’s hardly the most invasive thing in the world.

The concern is if increasing numbers of books pop up on shelves as a result of market research, rather than author inspiration. With the information collected from e-readers, publishers will encourage authors to write books based on profit.

Take a romance novel. Publishers will know the precise moment when boy meets girl, when boy should tie girl up, when boy should whip girl and when girl should fall in love with her tycoon boyfriend. It all sounds very familiar.

While Kurt Vonnegut explains that all stories follow this shape, the danger in this information being used to actually write novels is that they are at risk of becoming cold and formulaic.

Look at the recent success of The Hunger Games and Fifty Shades of Grey. E-reader publishers know that the average person read 57 pages per hour and took seven hours to finish the final book in the Hunger Games series. 

Amazon Kindle is able to see what passages readers like. The most highlighted passage of all time is: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them”. This comes from the second Hunger Games book and was highlighted by 17,784 people. The second is Jane Austen’s famous opening line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

Of the top 50 highlighted passages 27 of those belong to The Hunger Games. Those young adults have a lot to answer for.

It seems people are forgetting something… Cue Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita or even Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse 5. If publishers will only encourage authors to write what sells, they will not facilitate creativity or encourage good writing. Fifty Shades of Grey author E.L James is a terrible wordsmith, yet she is a successful author.

If the success of books such as the Harry Potter series, Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Fifty Shades of Grey are anything for e-reader publishers to go buy, fantasy and bondage are cash cows. So brace yourselves for a new series of books about magical beings entering into BDSM relationships.