Kindle & Nook App Users: You Are Being Watched

Here's something I'm willing to bet that very few Kindle and Nook owners (and users of those applications on smart phones, iPads, and PCs) realize.  Amazon and Barnes & Noble are spying on you, guys - what you read, how long it takes you to read it, how you search for new books, how far you get on a book before giving up on it...they know it all, and much more.

According to the Wall Street Journal, "you do not read an e-reader, e-reader reads you." Some of what the companies learn is not particularly surprising.

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.

Doesn't common sense say that "easier books" like crime fiction, romance, and much science fiction are going to be read more quickly and are more likely to be read to completion?  Frankly, compared to the more literary works of fiction they require less thought on the reader's part and can be gotten through in large, less fatiguing, chunks.  Frankly, I believe that readers of literary fiction are more adventurous readers (and are willing to take more chances on books choices) than readers of romance, thrillers, and other types of books that tend to be written to a standard formula.  That tendency leads, naturally, to more false starts and abandonment of reading choices on their parts.

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.

My initial gut reaction is to ask why we, as readers, allow an invasion of privacy of this magnitude?  Is it simply that most readers are unaware that this is happening (I certainly was)?  Why do we expect public libraries to keep this very same information private - an obligation taken very seriously by professional librarians everywhere?

EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has pressed for legislation to prevent digital book retailers from handing over information about individuals' reading habits as evidence to law enforcement agencies without a court's approval. Earlier this year, California instituted the "reader privacy act," which makes it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to gain access to consumers' digital reading records. Under the new law, agencies must get a court order before they can require digital booksellers to turn over information revealing which books their customers have browsed, purchased, read and underlined. The American Civil Liberties Union and EFF, which partnered with Google and other organizations to push for the legislation, are now seeking to enact similar laws in other states. 

Do you really want someone to track every single book you ever begin to read?  I do not.  One more reason that I have cut way back on the number of e-books I read even while I am reading more books than ever before.

On Comment Spam

Typical Spammer

I tried.  I really did.

I hate having to type in all those little characters before some site will accept my comment as one being sent by a living, breathing human being rather than some ignorant jackass spammer.  I hate it as much as the rest of you, believe me.  It sometimes takes me two or three tries to get all the characters right and I have been known to give up in frustration.  So I do get it.

I've been experimenting here on Book Chase by removing that requirement.  I expected more spam but I knew that the Blogger's spam-blocker works pretty well, so I thought it might be doable. And it was for a few days.  Then, what had been a spam-trickle, turned into a spam-stream, and finally into a roaring spam-river.  Over the last two or three days, I am averaging a spam message every 15 minutes - 24 hours a day - and it is getting worse.  I just don't have the time to monitor the flow or clean up after these fools.

So, very reluctantly, I am turning the comment filter back on.  You will once again have to prove that you have an actual human brain - unlike all the spammers out there who are definitely not human.  They barely qualify as members of the animal kingdom - and I feel bad about comparing spammers to donkeys.  I hope the donkeys will forgive me.

Canada

The first two sentences of Richard Ford’s Canada are, I suspect, destined to be among the most quoted of 2012.  Even so, I cannot resist using them here, too, because they are the perfect opening for the book:

            “First, I’ll tell you about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which happened later.”
 

These words are spoken by 65-year-old Dell Parsons, the book’s narrator, as he considers the fifteen-year old boy he was in 1960 just before his parents made the stupid decision that would almost destroy him and Berner, his twin sister.  The Parsons had been transferred to Montana by the U.S. Air Force, but now Dell’s father is a civilian, and having decided that Great Falls is a good place to raise his family, Bev Parsons is struggling to find a job that will allow him to do that.  To young Dell, nothing is more important than the fast-approaching start of his freshman year in the town’s public high school.  Up to now, the twins have been encouraged not to develop ties to the places they pass through with the Air Force, so Dell is eager to transform Great Falls into the hometown he has never known.

But when Dell’s parents are arrested for a North Dakota bank robbery, his hopes of finally settling down and making long term friends are destroyed before he can even set foot in his new school.  Dell and Berner are surprised to find themselves, at least temporarily, forgotten by the legal system that has both their parents locked tight in the city jail.  After Berner, the worldly twin, strikes out on her own, his mother’s only friend agrees to deliver Dell to her brother in the remote prairies of Saskatchewan in order to keep him from falling into the hands of Montana juvenile authorities.

Richard Ford

There, still a very naïve child at fifteen, Dell falls under the control and influence of two men who will further destroy his sense of who he is.  Charlie Quarters, the Leonard Hotel’s strange, half-breed hunting guide into whose charge Dell is delivered, will use him as an extra pair of hands.  Arthur Remlinger, an American hiding out in Canada for reasons of his own, is the hotel’s owner.  Unfortunately for Dell, Remlinger, a sociopath of sorts, will never be the father figure he needs so badly, and will, instead, almost finish the job of destroying his life.

Canada is a character-driven novel with the plot of a crime thriller, a literary novel that will keep the reader turning pages.  Throughout his narrative, Dell Parsons gives intriguing little hints that all is not as it seems and that he should have figured things out sooner than he did.  Ford’s characters are so well developed that even their most bizarre actions are believable in the context of who the reader knows them to be.  With perhaps one exception (Charlie Quarters), there are no black and white characters in Canada.  Each has a distinct set of strengths, weaknesses, and motivations that allows them to be sucked into whatever happens around them.

Canada is about borders – literal ones and symbolic ones – and what they really mean.  The lesson for Dell Parsons is that once some borders are crossed, they are crossed forever.  There is no going back.

The Canadian Book Challenge - Year 6

Want to join us?...click here

I don't have a real good history when it comes to completing book challenges, but this is one I've watched from afar for a while now- so after skipping the last few years, I thought I would give it another shot.  Canadian fiction has long been a favorite of mine, and John "stretches" the rules a bit to include books set in Canada (not just those written by Canadian authors), something that should help me to get my hands on the number of qualifiers I need to read in the next twelve months to get my thirteen books read before July 1, 2013.

I'm going to start out by cheating a bit because I just finished Richard Ford's great new novel a couple of days ago, a book actually titled Canada, and I plan to post my review on Monday or Tuesday.  I'm going to count that one, of which about 2/3 is set in the remote prairies of Saskatchewan, as my first book in the challenge.

John is a real advocate for Canadian lit and he puts a whole lot of effort into making his challenges go smoothly for everyone involved.  The number of participants has grown just about every year, so I don't see how he does it anymore.  If you're up for a new challenge, take a look.  Just follow the link under that great picture.

Best Books of 2012 - at Mid-Year

Half-way through 2012 already, and I'm finding these to be the best new books that I've encountered to this point.  This year's lists are limited to books published between October 1, 2011 and December 31, 2012.  That means that other worthy books will not be on the lists this year because they do not qualify as "new" titles. 

Fiction:

1.     Edge of Dark Water – Joe Lansdale - East Texas redneck noir at its finest

2.     The Angel Makers – Jessica Gregson – Hungarian women react badly to the aftermath of World War I

3.     Canada – Richard Ford – Some borders cannot be uncrossed

4.     The World Without You – Joshua Henkin – One family’s Fourth of July fireworks

5.     The Might Have Been – Joseph M. Schuster – A lifetime in the minor leagues

6.     The Sense of an Ending – Julian Barnes – What really happened?

7.     The Solitary House – Lynn Shepherd – Period mystery using many Bleak House characters

8.     The Red House – Mark Haddon – Two families get to know each other way too well

9.     The Fear Artist – Timothy Hallinan – Bad things are happening in Bangkok

10.  The Detour – Andromeda Romano-Lax – Hitler loots Italy before World War II

Nonfiction:

1.     The One – R.J. Smith – “the life and music of James Brown”

2.     Game Over – Bill Moushey, Bob Dvorchak – the horror of Jerry Sandusky and his enablers lives on

3.     Private Empire – Steve Coll – “ExxonMobil and American Power”

4.     Holy Ghost Girl – Donna M. Johnson – growing up while following a tent preacher from town to town

5.     Taking Flak – Dan Pastorini – frank sports autobiography from former Oiler quarterback

6.     Wild – Cheryl Strayed – one woman’s hike for her life

7.     This Mobius Strip of Ifs – Mathias B. Freese – Essays and memories

8.     The End of Illness – David B. Agus, M.D. – alternative medicine and new technology combined

9.     Out of My League – Dirk Hayhurst – He finally makes it to The Show for a little while

10.  The Voluntourist – Ken Budd – volunteering for manual labor all over the world

Blue Nights

Despite the incredible odds against a writer needing to produce a memoir describing a second round of personal grief so soon after releasing one focused on the death of a spouse, Joan Didion has done exactly that.  In that sense, Blue Nights is almost a sequel to The Year of Magical Thinking in which Didion detailed the emotional trauma associated with the unexpected death of husband John Gregory Dunn, a loss from which she barely recovered.  But, as it always does, life goes on – even when it leads to the death of one’s only child, as it did for Joan Didion less than two years after she lost her husband.

Because Quintana Roo was already dangerously ill at the time of her father’s death, the two books overlap in ways that will be illuminating to readers already familiar with The Year of Magical Thinking.  Although the first book primarily focused on the relationship between Dunn and Didion, the couple’s adoption and assimilation into their lives of the baby they named Quintana Roo is an important part of their story.  With Blue Nights, the focus shifts more, but not entirely, to the life they shared with their new daughter. 

John Gregory Dunn and Joan Didion traveled in exclusive Hollywood circles for much of their lives.  They lived the good life, a lifestyle that sometimes placed them and their daughter on the sets of major motion pictures and in the after-hours company of the Hollywood elite of the day.  The two were good at what they did and they were rewarded well for their efforts.  Little Quintana (who would, as an adult, meet her biological family) held her own in that world despite some early signs that she might not be as stable as she appeared.

Joan Didion

For instance, the little girl was obsessed with the scary “Broken Man” who threatened her in her dreams, a man she was able to describe to her mother in colorful and complete detail.  At five, she would inform her parents that, while they were out, she had called a mental institution to ask what to do if she went crazy.  But in the context of their world, this behavior only seems unusual to Didion in retrospect - as she questions whether she might have done a better job raising her daughter.  Blue Nights is actually more about Didion’s reaction to the loss of the two people closest to her than it is about her daughter’s life, a focus that leads directly to what is perhaps the most brutally honest portion of the memoir. 

Joan Didion, in her late seventies when she wrote this memoir, is also grieving the loss of one life skill after another as she approaches eighty years of age.  She is horrified by an incident that left her dazed and bleeding from a fall she cannot recall to this day. She describes the devastating onset of shingles from which she still sometimes suffers.  She rages against her increasing frailty, especially the decreasing sense of balance that makes her so vulnerable to bone-breaking falls.  She is saddened by the realization that she will never wear her favorite dresses or high heel shoes again.  She fears that her writing skill, the very talent that defines who she is to herself, is deteriorating. 

Worst of all, she understands that she is on her own – and will have to experience old age without either of the two people she loved most in the world around to help her through it.