How many hard-copy books sold every year are never read? How many DVDs from the discount bin are never watched?
This is different in a key way: Things that happen digitally seem to us like things we ought to be able to track, and indeed you can often produce a great deal of very precise data from them. As with web analytics, though, the precise data on downloads & "purchases" of $0-price books doesn't have any obvious connection outside of itself. Of course, it's entirely possible that we will be able to track this in the future, and I'd be surprised if the infrastructure to do so (on Kindle) didn't exist now. The privacy concerns would prevent Amazon from talking about that, and perhaps from actually doing it, but given what we know of the Kindle (it phones home to purchase books, has a facility for transferring license information from the server, can take 'delete' orders from the server, etc.), it seems clear that this would be trackable in principle. On Sat, Jan 23, 2010 at 7:25 AM, Alicia Henn <[email protected]> wrote: > “I guess my attitude right now is that I can be afraid of what’s coming or > I can try and aggressively embrace it in some form.” > That's Charlie Huston, author of the Joe Pitt vampire crime novel series, > in a NYT article on the practice of giving away free Kindle ebooks in hoping > of luring people into buying the rest of the series. Many of the top > "sellers" on Kindle are selling for $0, but are they really sold? > > http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/23/books/23kindle.html?th&emc=th > > Alicia > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]<r-spec%[email protected]> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "R-SPEC: The Rochester Speculative Literature Association" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/r-spec?hl=en.
