Kobo: few people finish reading literary fiction

[Brian G Turner]

Sorry if the article is old, but thought it was interesting - basically, Kobo tracking which books readers are most likely to finish:
Ebooks can tell which novels you didn't finish

And as per the headline, their finding is that high-brow literary fiction suffers from bad reading stats.

Completion rate for fantasy was considered high, at 60%. Remember this includes a lot of self-pubbed material, too.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Also it depends on the Kobo spyware AKA "track Reading" user setting and WiFi rather than USB transfer for them to gather these stats.

Still interesting.

high-brow literary fiction suffers from bad reading stats

You mean people buy stuff hyped by Literary Critics and Book Awards etc but find it boring? Not a surprise.

If you don't want Amazon & Kobo to know, only use USB transfer. Adobe DRM additions to ePub is particularly evil in the "spying on the reader" and not even encrypting, so the stats can be intercepted even at a public WiFi point. Kobo uses Adobe DRM.

 

[Ogma]

This shouldn't be a surprise. After all, literary fiction attempts to provide new perspectives and originality, experimental techniques, etc. The reasons I might love something might the same reasons you might hate it etc. You might have loved the literary author's first book but didn't like the second because it was too different or too similar to the first.

And it's not surprising really that so far there have been no self-published literary fiction successes. Even the Kindle Unlimited page rules are stacked against these writers.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

You might have loved the literary author's first book

I didn't like any James Joyce. Significant he self published and sold very little for a long time!

 

[Ogma]

I didn't like any James Joyce. Significant he self published and sold very little for a long time!

I think most of his stuff was published by Sylvia Beach, the then owner of Shakespeare & Company in Paris and a couple of other obscure publishers. More of a small press situation.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

I think most of his stuff was published by Sylvia Beach

I think originally a book shop. RTE has an part of an interview with her online.

In this excerpt from the programme ‘Self Portrait: Sylvia Beach’, Sylvia talks to Niall Sheridan about her encounters with James Joyce and how she came to publish ‘Ulysses’ from her small bookshop, ‘Shakespeare and Company’ frequented by J. M. Synge, Ernest Hemingway, Austin Clarke, Samuel Beckett, Scott Fitzgerald and many other young writers. Ulysses was published in February 1922.
The programme ‘Self Portrait: Sylvia Beach’ was filmed in the garden next to the Joyce Tower, Dublin following the opening of the Joyce Museum.
This programme was orignally broadcast as part of the ‘Self Portrait’ series 2 October 1962. Sylvia Beach died 3 days later.

Certainly he had various problems with three books. He did pay to get published.
IMO he's gratuitously rude, too experimental and boring, despite now being a "darling" of the the Literary world. Compared with Trollope and many others his writing was very slow, sometimes he only wrote for minutes a day, yet claimed extreme exhaustion. His "exile" to Switzerland was entirely self imposed. There are loads of great Irish authors (today too), but the "Literary" establishment denigrates most of the popular ones (from 19th C to today) and elevates people that are really boring egotists, though I will grant you that some are innovative or experimental.

 

[gdoc]

What a fascinating statistic, and one that seems intuitively true. I think most readers have probably tackled a few classics on the basis of their literary weight only to be disappointed. War and Peace must be up there I should imagine, along with Joyce. Most of the nineteenth century authors too. Some would include Shakespeare too, although most of his output are plays.

To use a SF example, I found Aldiss's Helliconia series in this vein; long, impenetrable and nothing happened.

 

[The Big Peat]

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Aldiss's Helliconia series

Generally I'd be a fan, but I read the first two, never bothered with third. I thought it his poorest work.

 

[gdoc]

Generally I'd be a fan, but I read the first two, never bothered with third. I thought it his poorest work.

I got the impression Aldiss did it because he felt he ought to attempt a science fiction book that could compete with so-called literary fiction. Just my subjective view of course, for which I have no evidence.

Anyone else aware of science fiction or fantasy authors who have attempted an inappropriately weighty tome when a quick 60,000 worder would have done the job?

 

[Stephen Palmer]

And here was me thinking Helliconia was SF's greatest work after The Book Of The New Sun.