Hiptype is the new Ycombinator Kid: analytics for e-books
A new ambitious project for tapping the e-book market is under pipeline from the ycombinator backed company Hiptype. This company has developed a pluggin to track the ebook reading behavior of the readers and study their reading habits. This attempt has been made to understand the intricacies of the ebooks market and provide fruitful idea to the publishers of the book. Although there are n numbers of ebook readers from the Big Giants like Amazon, Kobo, Apple ,Barnes and Noble and others Hiptype provides a scope for the original publishers to understand the behavior of the readers . For instance number of people visiting the Book virtually, number of people buying it, and number of people actually reading to end could be known from the pluggins developed by Hiptype. The data collected has a need of Big Data platforms to analyze further.
At present there are lot of privacy challenges associated with it , according to the company the readers will be fully informed about the each and every information exchange process. The company has assured about the privacy of the readers and said it would be done without revealing the real identity of the reader. As many critics has called it as spying; the company has opened doors for further conversation related to privacy. Although it is still not clear whether the company is going to introduce any incentives or not but the innovation would be of a great boon to the publishers. If the venture gains popularity Hiptype would be known as the Google analytics for the Ebooks.
Although there has been many opportunity for the analytic tools from the company there is a limitation – The pluggins can only be made operational in the HTML5 and JavaScript environment. The technical constraints makes it ineffective across the wide range of the ebook readers. So there is a pressing need to launch the product as platform independent so that the analytics report could be read from anywhere and from any device. The analytics report would include the Demographics details and geographic locations. So overall the data collected would save the Book Publishing industry and add some more dimensions of competition.
