For instance, this article in London's Telegraph reports that some novelists who hope to sell a lot of Kindle books are constructing their plots so that a major cliffhanger occurs about 10% of the way into the book. Why? Because that's about how much of a book Amazon allows readers to download as samples. These writers (there will be more and more of them) try to calculate precisely when to insert that Oh-my-goodness-what-happens-next moment, so that it occurs at just the instant when ...

End of this sample Kindle book

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I imagine another possible development. It's delightful how my Kindle remembers where I left off reading a book, so that whether I'm on the Kindle itself or my phone or a tablet I pick it up at just the right location. But of course that means that Amazon knows how far I've read into any given Kindle book, and therefore knows the precise point where I stopped reading something that I never finished. That's very valuable information indeed to editors and publishers (and of course Amazon is now in the publishing game).

Here's the value: if a significant percentage of readers are running out of steam at the same point in a book, then perhaps the text needs to be sent back to the author for tweaking. A second edition -- or a third, or a fourth: there's no necessary limit to the iterations -- can perhaps fix the problem, which can get more readers to finish the book, which can get the book higher ratings on Amazon, which can lead to higher sales. Unhappy readers of the first edition can be informed that there's a freely downloadable New and Improved Version, which may induce them to give the book another try.

In short, the "release early, iterate often" model of software development could end up being a big part of the future of book publishing. Of course, writers have always been responsive to their audiences: consider Arthur Conan Doyle, who got so sick of writing Sherlock Holmes stories that he killed off his beloved detective, only to be convinced -- by big bundles of cash waved in his face more than by the grief of Holmes fans -- to bring him back from the dead for many more stories. But these new developments promise something different: micro-marketing, even nano-marketing, and endless iteration. Future conversations about books may less often begin with "Have you read X?" than with "Which version of X have you read?" Which will be rather weird.

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