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{WE INTERRUPT THIS POST FOR A BIRTHDAY GREETING:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALICE MUNROE! She turns 81 today}
She wrote:
A story is not like a road to follow …
it's more like a house.
You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other,
how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows.
And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space,
whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished.
You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time.
It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.
NOW BACK TO OUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED POST:
Reading is solitary and private no longer.
According to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, the major new players in e-book publishing,
Amazon, Apple and Google, can easily track how far readers are getting in books,
how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books.
Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading.
Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.
Did you know it takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins's "Hunger Games" trilogy on the Kobo e-reader?
About 57 pages an hour.
Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series:
"Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."
And on Barnes & Noble's Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first "Hunger Games" book is to download the next one.
Data collected from Nooks reveals, for example, how far readers get in particular books, how quickly they read and how readers of particular genres engage with books.
Barnes & Noble has determined, through analyzing Nook data, that nonfiction books tend to be read in fits and starts,
while novels are generally read straight through,
and that nonfiction books, particularly long ones, tend to get dropped earlier.
Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of literary fiction do, and finish most of the books they start.
Readers of literary fiction quit books more often and tend skip around between books.
Amazon, in particular, has an advantage in this field—
it's both a retailer and a publisher, which puts the company in a unique position to use the data it gathers on its customers' reading habits.
It's no secret that Amazon and other digital book retailers track and store consumer information detailing what books are purchased and read.
Kindle users sign an agreement granting the company permission to store information from the device—
including the last page you've read, plus your bookmarks, highlights, notes and annotations—in its data servers.
Amazon can identify which passages of digital books are popular with readers, and shares some of this data publicly on its website through features such as its "most highlighted passages" list.
Readers digitally "highlight" selections using a button on the Kindle;
they can also opt to see the lines commonly highlighted by other readers as they read a book.
Amazon aggregates these selections to see what gets underlined the most.
Topping the list is the line from the "Hunger Games" trilogy. It is followed by the opening sentence of "Pride and Prejudice."
Forget Big Brother. Big Business is watching you!
