Any initial approach of measuring anything (here: book interests) can be attacked on its simplicty. Neccessarily the first measure will have lots of unwanted special cases and it is just too easy to point these out - especially if they are obviously biased toward economic value.
[Trying to simplify] is a goal of dumbing down books to get stupid people to understand them. That's why people cite 1984. Orwell's newspeech is also about dumbing down intellectual discourse.
It is also easy to laud any approach of measuring based on the gain of information/knowledge it entails and transitively the improvements that gains.
What gets measured gets optimized.
It is always more difficult to see where such a measurement really leads. Extrapolating can be done on different complexity levels.
The simplest is always to just assume maximization of the measureable (here: maximize fun and by sales monetary gains).
The next level is to consider effects of the maximization and balancing effects (it may fall short or it might tip the system; here: dumbing down authorship tips with Hollywood-sickness result).
Another direction is to consider improvements to the measurement. What else might be measured to give authors feedback? And what results from maximizing that?
The next level is to consider the effect of the public on the process of measurement.
Ultimately one can envision to model this as part of a societal dynamic stabilizing on a fixed point. I wonder whether prediction markets can reach such a level.
My prediction:
Actually one can always build such a prediction by assuming the topic develops sufficiently to be come worthy of study. The direction in time is mostly math (can it be done) -> technology (how is it done effectively) -> economics (how to generate value from it) -> sociology (how does is affect people) -> politics (aggregate people affects) -> philosophy (reflection and rationalization) -> historics (posthoc documentation)
Damn. I can't write short comments.
On HackerNews, this article was linked. The general idea is that companies are studying what people like to read, to help authors produce books that people like to read.
Now, for me, when I look at this idea, I see some down sides, but I certainly see some benefits as well.
Almost none of the commenters on NYTimes seemed to see any benefit whatsoever to studying reader behaviour. There were a few who saw the downsides as more mild than the other commenters. But most of the commenters basically saw this technology as some sort of 1984-esque idea that will turn all books into uninteresting, unimaginative pieces of paper that would better serve as a door stopper than as something for literary consumption. Out of 50 comments that I've read, only one person has said something along the lines of, 'This technology can possibly offer something to help authors improve their books'.
Is this just technophobia? Or am I missing something, and this really is a horrible, evil technology that should be avoided at all costs? [That's a rhetorical question -- I'd be surprised if even one LWian held that position]
I guess what I'm asking is, what are the psychological roots for the almost-unanimous aversion to this attempt at gathering and using information about what people want?