So some big companies are using technology to improve their services – big deal. Or at least that seems to be the balance of opinion around these parts on the news that while you're reading your favourite ebook, your favourite ebook is reading you. Of course it's not strictly speaking news to those of you who follow the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or indeed the Wall Street Journal, but for those of us who don't spend our lives cogitating on the details of every End User License Agreement we sign up to, it still comes of something of a shock to realise that – sotto voce – your electronic device is keeping up running commentary on your reading habits.

Maybe you've already followed dickcheeseman's advice and sprung your Kindle out of Amazon's embrace or maybe, as R042 suggests, you've cut your e-reader off from its natural habitat and foresworn WiFi, but even if like Commontata you "couldn't care less" what any business has on you, the default collection of user data is another signal that electronic devices shift reading into something a little more commercial.

Jeff Bezos's vision for the Kindle was always that it should let readers concentrate only on the text, that it should "disappear" – a vision which he explained in terms of a reading experience which matched the ability of paper, ink and stitching to dissolve as you read them, leaving only "the author's world". But as the device fades into the background, there alongside the text is a bookshop. A bookshop already primed for payment and ready to go. That ability for an electronic device to disappear makes book-buying a seamless part of reading. After all, Bezos says, the "coolest feature is that you can think of a book and have it a minute later". And we do. According to Market Watch, Kindle users typically spend 56% more a month than regular Amazon customers.

Market research is hardly a new phenomenon, as borisborisorff points out, but in the old days, once you had bought a book – or, imagine, borrowed it from a library – the reading of it was largely divorced from commercial considerations. Now every page you turn is being logged for financial gain, sifted for competitive advantage.

Maybe you're unworried by the spectre Ben Robinson raises of publishers going the same way as movie studios – as AggieH points out, the most interesting writers will ignore this kind of pressure anyhow. Maybe FlightlessHedghog's concerns about reading The Satanic Verses in Tehran seem like nothing more than paranoia – despite the dangers that aggregated data doesn't always stay private, particularly if you start combining it with other datasets. Or perhaps you feel that privacy is a fair price to pay for cheaper books, or lighter luggage, or the challenge they offer to publishing's traditional gatekeepers. But in a world where commericial forces beset us on every side, the routine logging of reader data is another intrusion of the market into the private sphere. Unless you're prepared to "modify, defeat, or tamper" with the software on your electronic reader – then you've signed up for that.