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Monday, 5th April 2010

Brilliant Idea: Kindle Can Do for Books What Last.fm Did for Music

Brilliant Idea: Kindle Can Do for Books What Last.fm Did for Music

Zoinks, this is clever. Paul Lamere, an app developer in the online music industry and a blogger about the same, points out that one often overlooked feature of Amazon's Kindle might change the way we buy books by gathering some smart metrics.

Lamere specifically points to Whispersync, a feature that keeps track of where you are in a book and syncs that data with any other device--from an iPhone to an iPad to a computer--so that you can pick up where you left off. Here's the great idea: Armed with that data, it's only a short stop to some pretty amazing metrics, which we've never seen before for books.

Amazon could then do something for books that's a bit like what Last.fm has done for music. Here's five superb ideas out of 17 that Lamere came up with:

Most Abandoned - the books and/or authors that are most frequently left unfinished. What book is the most abandoned book of all time? (My money is on ‘A Brief History of Time’) A related metric – for any particular book where is it most frequently abandoned? (I’ve heard of dozens of people who never got past ‘The Council of Elrond’ chapter in LOTR).

Pageturner – the top books ordered by average number of words read per reading session. Does the average Harry Potter fan read more of the book in one sitting than the average Twilight fan?

Burning the midnight oil – books that keep people up late at night.

Read Speed – which books/authors/genres have the lowest word-per-minute average reading rate? Do readers of Glenn Beck read faster or slower than readers of Jon Stewart?

Most Re-read – which books are read over and over again? A related metric – which are the most re-read passages? Is it when Frodo claims the ring, or when Bella almost gets hit by a car?

Source: Fast Company


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