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  3. What Your iPad Knows About You[A] You’ve finally finished t

What Your iPad Knows About You[A] You’ve finally finished t

游客2023-06-30  17
问题                     What Your iPad Knows About You
[A] You’ve finally finished the book your co-worker recommended, so what to read next? If it is 5 a,m., chances are that you’re reaching for a romance novel—especially if you’re in Texas or Georgia. By early morning, thrillers might start to look more appealing. And if Philip K. Dick is your favorite author, books about beer are probably more up your taste than anything about wine or liquor.
[B] These are some of the insights from Scribd Inc. and Oyster, two startups that offer unlimited e-book rentals for a monthly subscription fee. Scribd, Oyster and Entitle Books—which just launched in December—are tracking reader behavior in hopes of figuring out recommendations of exactly what you’ll want to pick up next.
[C] About 50% of the U.S. population owns a dedicated e-reader, according to a Pew Research study released last month. In addition, 28% read an e-book last year, up from 23% the previous year. The services are expanding. Scribd, a San Francisco-based site that started selling monthly e-book subscriptions last October, announced this month that its app is available on Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Kindle Paperwhite. After running exclusively on Apple’s operating system, New York-based Oyster plans to expand to Android later this year. And Entitle is considering adding an all-you-can-read feature to complement its current "book of the month"-style subscription service. Subscription services are popular because they "reduce the emotional burden" of purchasing, says Julie Haddon, Scribd vice president of marketing. Buying a book creates pressure to finish and get your money’s worth, she adds. In addition, people might try to save money by buying a cheaper book instead of the one they really want.
[D] Brian Konash, 34, who works at Web startup Squarespace in Manhattan, joined Oyster two months ago because it didn’t cause the buyers’ sense of guilty he experienced when purchasing Kindle e-books. "You’ve already paid for the service, so you can read as much as you want," he says. "With other models, there’s that little financial bite each time you want to buy a book and you worry that it’s going to be worthless." Mr. Konash, who has been picking books based on the site’s suggestions, predicts he’ll read up to 10 more books a year beyond his usual 25.
[E] An all-access subscription "lowers the activation energy for reading," says Oyster CEO Eric Stromberg. Reading often has a high "activation energy" because there’s a time gap between wanting to read a book and then actually getting your hands on it, he says. "When you can order a book and instantly get it on your tablet, you can hear about the book and then read it right there," says Willem van Lancker, Oyster’s chief product officer.
[F] "From the publishing perspective, the biggest problem is how to get people to care about a new book," says Otis Chandler, CEO of Goodreads, a site where people share what they’re reading and post recommendations. Goodreads, which was acquired by Amazon in March, uses an algorithm (运算法则 ) that recommends books that users with similar taste have enjoyed.
[G] Oyster and Scribd ask readers to rate books, what they call an "active signal." They also track "passive signals," such as the percentage of a book that a reader finishes and the click rate, or how many people who are shown a book click through to learn more. The companies use that information among other factors to recommend books. Active signals represent what we wish we read, while passive signals are more honest, says Jared Friedman, Scribd chief technology officer. A lot of people give a 5-star rating to "The Great Gatsby," while they read greedily, but don’t necessarily rate, thrillers like "The Da Vinci Code," for example.
[H] Other findings: Self-help might be a popular market, yet only about 20% of people who start such a book finish it. More than 80% of people who crack the pages of a mystery novel will find out who did it. People read through biographies at 20 pages per hour, while they read at three times that speed for erotica (色情作品). And higher "acceleration factor"—or how much readers speed up as they get closer to finishing—correlates with higher average rating for a book. One of the highest acceleration factors comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s "Cat’s Cradle," which readers start speeding through at the halfway mark, Mr. Friedman says. All three companies allow users to hide their reading behavior from other customers, but users can’t opt out of their behavior being collected by the company itself. Entitle, however, says it keeps track of browsing and download information only.
[I] Personalized recommendations drive 10 times more browsing traffic than lists based on themes such as "globe-trotting memoirs" or "bad role models" that copy racks at the front of bookstores, Scribd’s Mr. Friedman says. The company is interested in combining algorithms with lists to create a list of best sellers that someone would, based on past reading behavior, find interesting. Another possible approach is to suggest different books or genres depending on time of day to take advantage of what the company knows about time-based preferences.
[J] The algorithm doesn’t just analyze behavior signals, but "reads" through a book’s text to pull out different topics, genres and subjects, says Bryan Batten, chief executive of Entitle. There’s also a patent-pending (申请专利中的) service called "if these books had a baby," where users can input two books and find a third with similar themes. For example, the "baby" of Joseph Heller’s "Catch-22" and Leo Tolstoy’s "Anna Karenina" is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s "The Brothers Karamazov" but the product of "Catch-22" and Steve Jobs biography is a book called "Dealers of Lightning," about engineers at Xerox Corp.
[K] Entitle operates on a tiered model: two books for $9.99 a month (the most popular plan), three for $14.99, and so on. For customers, the upside is being able to keep the e-books, even if they cancel the service. The services, of course, compete with the library. But libraries have had limited e-book offerings and there are often waits for the books. Robert Wolven, co-chair of the American Library Association’s Digital Content Working Group, says demand has increased significantly in the past 18 months. He says he doesn’t see the startups as a threat.
[L] While libraries’ budget for e-books has been growing, licensing restrictions mean that popular titles often aren’t available, says Laura Girmscheid, research manager for the trade publication Library Journal, which recently released its fourth annual report on e-books in libraries. This, combined with holds on e-books, is the largest hurdle preventing people from using library e-books more. "It’s just not convenient for instant access," Ms. Girmscheid says. [br] Due to the time gap between wanting to read a book and actually starting reading, people need high activation energy to read a paper book.
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答案 E
解析 根据关键词time gap和high activation可快速定位到E段。该段第2句指出，阅读需要很强的“激发能量”，因为读者想读某书和真正着手去读它之间存在时间差。本题将原文的原因状语从句转化为Due to引导的状语，意思与原文一致，故确定出处为E段。
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