Creating biased book statistics…
Friday, March 25th, 2016This post is a follow-up on my post “Book Marketing—Anecdotes v. Real Stats.” In that article I was ranting against people treating anecdotal evidence about book sales as reliable statistics. Now I have something else to be riled about: Jellybooks. This reader analytics company based in London makes studies of book reading habits and passes the results off as reliable stats. Sound harmless? Please, please, don’t bury your head in the sand—it isn’t harmless at all! Both readers and writers should be concerned. All readers, not just ebook readers, and all writers, not just indie writers.
Let’s deal with the general situation first. It always amazes me that people froth at the mouth when they read or hear that the government is allegedly violating their privacy. The amazement comes from the fact that they let data-mining corporations and private firms peer into their private lives all the time on the internet. Private companies also manipulate people with false advertising and false endorsements. A recent case where Lord and Taylor paid bloggers on Instagram to rate a dress highly all at the same time created outrage, but folks, don’t be naive—that goes on all the time. Any product endorsement is suspect these days, and book reviews are examples of this.
Data-mining firms sell—ho hum, ain’t it obvious?—data they collect about you. They collect data about your personal lives, your consumer lives, your health histories, whatever. So does Google, Apple, General Motors, Microsoft, almost any big firm. (Have a gmail or Google+ account? You’re handing over all kinds of data about yourself to Google. Anyone online does. Wise up.) This process is far more insidious than what the U.S. government does. The government’s alleged purpose (I only say “alleged” because I can imagine abuses—I’m a mystery and thriller writer, after all) is to protect us. The purpose in the private sector is more insidious—they want to exploit us. That exploitation is usually associated with making money, and, because consumers in our consumer society have few protections, the perps usually get away with it.
Enter Jellybooks. Forget the “books” part of the name; I’m tempted to call this company Jellyball, because it’s like a jellyfish with stinging tentacles that are about to grab you and do you damage. Let’s analyze their business model, ripped right out of the data-mining firms’ playbooks. The people in charge saw a niche. What the hell? That’s free enterprise, right? They saw that traditional publishers really don’t have a clue about the readers they’re selling to or their reading habits. Up to now, publishers didn’t give a rat’s ass because they live thirty years in the past where there wasn’t much real competition. But Jellybooks is convincing them to care. While the publishers obviously have data on their own sales, that data is about purchases, not how people read. Jellybooks wants to look at readers’ reading habits in the same way the techie Billy Beane in Moneyball looked at baseball players’ habits so smart product design and sales strategies can be found (and now you know why I’m talking about balls, and they’re not Trump’s).