I read just about every book on Kindle for about a decade now. Love that my local library has a great collection of eBooks which makes this possible. Don't recall ever having read a Kindle self-published book so this New Yorker story was eye-opening :
"..The platform pays the author by the number of pages read, which creates a strong incentive for cliffhangers early on, and for generating as many pages as possible as quickly as possible. The writer is exhorted to produce not just one book or a series but something closer to a feed—what McGurl calls a “series of series.” In order to fully harness K.D.P.’s promotional algorithms, McGurl says, an author must publish a new novel every three months."
For my own reading, Amazon's recommendations are somewhat interesting but it has not lead to the kind of discoveries I would love. However, when J was a younger and a fussy reader, I found recommendations based on what she did like very useful. It opened the world of books I was never familiar with from my childhood. Between Nancy Pearl and Amazon's Products Related to this Item, I was able to find J books she actually enjoyed. The idea of commoditizing literature to produce an endless stream of cliff-hanging content is rather sad.
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