The Lair

I was watching late night TV yesterday and I saw the first part of Reader, I married him. On a vaguely bookish theme, this dealt with romfic or romantic fiction as a genre. I expected to nod off shortly into a few cutscene interviews with gushing women about how romfic changed their lives but it was a slightly more compelling documentary than I had anticipated, filled with interesting little factoids about the industry.

For example, I discovered that romfic accounts for 40% of all paperback sales? That’s a lot more than I imagined. There were also some theories that fewer men buy books written by women; that men are reluctant to buy books with the word Love in the title and most fascinating of all, reading romantic fiction can reduce stress levels by as much as 20%. Only the last was even quasi-experimentally established though, the first two observations sounded like anecdotes to me.

I rush to call out the apparent anecdotes because I’m currently in the middle of the intriguing Lymond Chronicles which are written by Dorothy Dunnet. I’ve also professed fandom in the past for Julian May - who turned out to be a female. I’m not sure which way that last example can be counted though; perhaps more women need to write with masculine sounding names to test out the hypothesis? Then again, perhaps it’s not wrong - the other half dozen or so books on my reading hopper right now are all by male authors.

There was also a lot of malarkey about romfic book covers being targetted to a specifically feminine audience; with horrifically anti-masculine cover colours of pink and lilac and lavender and … well, pale pastel shades. Some commentary was also devoted to how romfic was sneered upon by most people, despite its apparent popularity at the sales till. Actually, I’d probably call BS on sneering for elitism’s sake. Forget about the book covers. I come from a household where books are reasonably plentiful and as females outnumber the males; romfic is easily available. I’m slightly queasy at admitting it but in times of dire need (ie:, boredom and lack of anything else to read), I may have actually tried reading some of that tripe. It’s uh.. formulaic, predictable and sometimes vaguely funny, unintentionally so. If my (admittedly limited) sample size is anything to go by, I think most romantic fiction authors can be replaced by a moderately “intelligent” piece of computer software and a few hundred randomly generated key phrases, plotlines and sex scenes.

Onto something related, the idea of profiling… What you read can, in effect, be used to deduce things about you. The trivial romfic example is that someone is almost twice as likely to be female if they buy a bodice ripper from a bookstore. But this trivial form of statistical profiling can be extended in new and somewhat sinister ways too. Take, for example the NewScientist piece on new software from Microsoft being used to discover identities. And people are running around screaming like this is a new thing.

Actually, from experience in doing the same thing (more or less) a few years ago, I find that making educated sloppy guesses about gender and age and a particular income demographic is not hard at all, even with very limited resources. However, obtaining information with high precision is much much harder. Put another way, it’s easier to differentiate the the 21-50 year olds from everyone else than it is to differentiate the age bands 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. Targetted online marketing has been around for the last decade or so but when I was writing software like this - the cost for the average marketing/promotional campaign did not even come close to the amounts required for really detailed demographic surveying. Perhaps now the techniques and the data volumes are finally available to people who can made it ubiquitous. Not an entirely comforting thought, especially if Microsoft and Google are going to try muscling into the territory.

Update: Interesting idea on thwarting monitoring and profiling systems starts here or later on in the same thread, winnowing and chaffing.