Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading

like Goodreads and LibraryThing use individually written reviews as the basis of recommendations, but these suffer from one deep shortcoming: well-promoted books get a lot of reviews, and older or under-advertised books get few reviews. Just because a book is old doesn’t mean it isn’t great. But if a book doesn’t get many reviews, the tacit assumption is that the book isn’t worth reading—which may not be true. A truly democratic book-recommendation engine could automatically review and rate all books, giving Fifty Shades of Grey just as much attention as a hidden gem like A Voyage to Arcturus , one of my favorite novels.
    Such a book-discovery system should look at the text of a book as the basis for making recommendations. This would democratize the process and let the text speak for itself. It would allow neglected books to shine and put overpromoted books in their place.
    With a democratic book-discovery system, readers looking for a particular niche of content could find hidden gems based on an algorithmic analysis of an author’s style, gender, and time period; by the kinds of tables or equations inside the book or the places mentioned; by measures of the vocabulary used or ratios of adjectives to nouns; by the percentage of functional words like “of,” “to,” and “in”; by sentence length and paragraph count; by dependent clauses and dangling participles; by parentheticals and punctuation; by the use of curses, colors, and capitalized words; by the amount of dialogue and number of dashes; by reading-grade level and density of the text; by the cast of characters and the kinds of plotlines; by the use of footnotes and sentence fragments; by alliteration, sibilance, rhyme, and rhetoric; and finally, by quantifying the subjective, emotional experience of reading a book.
    To succeed, a company needs to treat this as a deep problem in computer science—a deep and perhaps unsolvable problem, because after all, what you’re really doing is teaching a computer how to read!
    Democratic book-discovery engines will eventually emerge and become popular, and a whole host of other book-related companies will emerge too. The ebook revolution has spurred an evolutionary explosion of new startups. Some cater to better ebook browsing, some to annotations. Some sell their books on subscriptions, while others serialize them. We’re very much alive in the time of rapid evolutionary change, a lot like the way it was in the era of the Burgess Shale Formation.
    I could list the names of some of these new ebook companies, but many of them won’t last long enough to still be around by the time this book is published. I’m amazed at the number of these ebook companies and their diversity. It’s like being a commentator alive during the Cambrian era and pointing out all the creatures scuttling on the sea floor. There’s one with fangs! That one has ten eyes! And that one looks like a crawling tongue! They scuttle through the mud too fast to be named, and I can only marvel at the sheer evolutionary diversity, the creative genius, and the deep pockets of their venture-capital angel investors.
    Which of these companies will survive? Which, if any, will be here to stay by the end of this revolution? Do you have a favorite or one you’re keeping an eye on?
    http://jasonmerkoski.com/eb/14.html

Globalization
    We were all rebels and outlaws at Amazon. It was gold-rush territory.
    I suppose that’s only fitting, given Amazon’s roots in the Pacific Northwest, the Wild West Northwest. Back in the 1890s, there were towns in the Northwest—they might be lumber towns or mining towns—that would sometimes succeed. There’d be a boom in mining or logging, and people would flood in from all over the country and the world. All of a sudden, instead of just ten dusty prospectors on the streets after the saloon closed for the night, there’d be lawyers and accountants and, yes, prostitutes, all looking to capitalize on rumors they’d heard of untold riches.
    Seattle was once the gateway to gold-rush territory, and that still shows as you drive through the old-timey downtown streets. You can see signs on brick buildings that were meant for prospectors a hundred years ago, signs for stores where they could provision themselves with sleeping sacks and hard-tack and pemmican and gold pans before they headed into the Yukon. But now there’s a new gold rush in town, the gold rush of ebooks.
    This gold rush is heading farther