4. How do you feel about airlines mining your in-flight data? Is this any different from companies mining your credit card purchases or Web surfing? With the amount of data available to companies doubling every year, new sources of data, and innovations in data collection, possibilities for marketers to identify market niches and finely tune campaigns are boundless. In the e-book market, for example, three reading subscription service startups—Scribd, Oyster, and Entitle—aim to turn a profit by discovering exactly what makes readers tick.

A flat monthly fee gives users unlimited access to a broad selection of titles from these companies’

digital libraries. Like Barnes and Noble and Amazon, the newcomers will collect an assortment of data from their customers’ digital reading devices (e-readers, tablets, smartphones), including whether a book is completed, if pages are skimmed or skipped, and which genres are most often finished. These subscription services intend to disseminate what they have learned. The idea is that writers can use it to better tailor their work to their readership, and book editors can use it to choose which manuscripts to publish.