Deborah Cooke: Author

Here’s an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week. It’s about e-readers and how they track your reading habits, then report the results back to the vendor’s server.

I’ll wait while you go and read it.

What do you think of this? While it doesn’t surprise me that this is possible – or that vendors would want to collect this data and use it to fine tune their marketing efforts – this has several troubling elements for me. For one, if the data is gathered without the consumer’s knowledge, this is a violation of privacy. In Canada, we have a Privacy Act. Because of this act, all consumers must be informed if data about them is being gathered, and how it is going to be used. There are no automatic opt-ins but automatic opt-outs – the consumer has to explicitly consent to be a participant in the data collection process. My friend who has a KOBO says it is set up this way, that she has to decide what information will be shared back to KOBO from her e-reader. If this isn’t the case in the States, that worries me.

It’s nobody’s business how fast you read, or what passages are resonant for you.

The end of the article, which talks about readers voting to determine the ultimate direction of the story, is also problematic. While there have always been some kinds of stories that are reader-determined (and there is a market for them), it’s probably not a surprise that as a writer, I’m not excited by the idea of story resolutions being dictated by audience. There is also a niche of writing called “work for hire”, which means that the customer (usually the publisher) defines the story, then hires the writer to “just write it down”. When I have taken this kind of work, it has either been easy (rare) or extremely difficult (much more common) as the customer has a firm idea of what they want but can’t articulate it. In my experience, work for hire has many many rounds of revisions. Work for hire typically pays well, but the author works pretty hard for that money – so hard that it might not seem like a good deal in the end. This voting by consumers sounds to be like work for hire multiplied a thousand times – instead of trying to please three or four people, the writer would be trying to please thousands.

Another facet of this is whether people really can anticipate what they want to read, or whether they do better with the surprise of discovery. I can imagine that some publishers would love this interactive plan – as it would eliminate a lot of risk in deciding what kind of stories to publish or the ultimate direction of those stories – but I worry about the kind of fiction we’d have as a result. I suspect it would be pretty flat and predictable, no matter what the skill of the author, because it had been effectively written by committee.

What do you think of all of this? Do you have an e-reader? Do you know what it’s up to when you log on to the server? Does it worry you? What about books? Do you want to vote on the outcome of the story? Or would you rather just read and be entertained?