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Comment by tseabrooks | Hacker News Reader

I expect to be a lone voice in a sea of positivity...

The very notion of A/B testing a piece of art disturbs me profoundly. The idea that publishers would say, "Our analytics show readers engage with these types of passages so you need to increase your usage of X passages by 50% and use 50% more words from this list", paints a fairly dim view of the future of artistic expression in a world that is concerned with profitability over substance at an increasing rate.

Publishers already have a far heavier hand than I'd like them to or most people know about. Giving middle manager types data when it comes to artwork can only lead to place where self expression through authorship becomes a dead art-form.

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Actually, as a reader, I would prefer book publishers to know what gets read in their books and what doesn't. Likewise, I would like to know that information as a reader.

There've been countless times when I purchased a heavily advertised (well reviewed) book, only to find out that it was worthless piece of ... Anyways, those books weren't written for me; they repeated the same stuff over and over and over again.

One example - Good to Great. The first chapter is good, so is the second (maybe). Everything afterwards is just a repetition of the same concept. If I could see ahead of time that most readers stop reading the book 20% in, I'd make my assumptions and not even bother to try to get through it.

Likewise, there are books where the first chapters are quite tedious to read, but the rest are great. If, while reading chapter 1, I could see that most people struggled but then persisted and loved the book, that might encourage me to get going.

Just my 2 cents.

We find it very fascinating that people either love Hiptype or are profoundly disturbed. What we're doing is not different than what occurs on the websites and mobile apps you already use, so the difference is one of culture.

What I'm most curious about is the extent to which these cultural norms will shift as it becomes more common for books to contain analytics like ours.

Preface: I hadn't considered technical books and all comments are about stories, both fiction and non fiction.

As someone who has grown up on the internet for the last two decades there is something decidedly different between a website, a blog, and a mobile app when compared to a book. It's something ephemeral I can't put my finger on.

There is magic in books. From a child's earliest days books provide a window to other worlds and realities. Some of these worlds show us glimpses of greatness and happiness others show us the darkest depths of human sadness and despair. We are given characters to love and hate along side characters to use as reflections of ourselves. In all of this there is a certain magic to books. They provide judgement free escapes for the outcasts and loners; Later in life they provide the community for those very same outcasts and loners to come together.

I realize I sound naive and possibly unrealistic. Also, I acknowledge that this community in particular tends towards efficiency and has a tenuous relationship with the humanities. However, all that aside, this feels like it cheapens the reading experience.

I hope this doesn't become the norm for authors telling stories. While perhaps a bit more hyperbolic than necessary this all feels akin to A/B testing The Sistine Chapel. Let's not go around letting MBAs and Middle Managers fuck with art.

You might just be A/B testing your samples or your jacket text. I'm guessing a lot of authors would agree with you that they don't want to change specific passages in their stories. But I see a lot of them working on making their sales better by providing better blurbs. It's the equivalent of being able to change your outside back cover text to get people more interested.

For fiction and other works intended to be purely art, sure. But for technical, explanatory books...seems like better analytics could be a huge boon.

I agree. If people skip to a section of a coding book all the time, an author could decide it needs expansion or might base a whole other title on the subject.

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