We all know that Kindles are evil, and Amazon tracks everything what you read and bla bla bla … But this story really shows how much they collect about you.

A friend of mine published recently a book and shared an interesting screenshot of the Kindle Direct Publishing page. The screenshot shows a dashboard with a field on many pages of the book have been read in the last month. The metrics is called the KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) count and according to the KDP amazon help page (which I’m not going to link here) it’s a monthly report updated on the 15th of every month.

I can see the usefulness of this report for authors and for the publishers. But think this through - what data does Amazon need to collect from your reading device such that they can provide this? This means that Amazon has a detailed dataset about your reading habits - what you read, how often, how long, when, … I find that freaking scary and I say that as someone who published a curated list of books that I read and recommend publicly on this blog on the open internet.

My point is that an example like this, transforms the abstract fear that “your data is being collected” into something specific and tangible. Amazon wouldn’t be able to show the KENP count per month to publishers, if they wouldn’t collect data about how far in every book you are at every point in time. This means that Amazon literally looks over your shoulder as you read. Your Kindle collects all kind of information about your reading habbits. If it wouldn’t, Amazon couldn’t provide this information to publishers.

And now add your spending habits or an Alexa device that gets to know your daily routine, shopping lists, a partial search history and more.

And now what?

Nothing of this is new. But it shows how much data our surveillance overlords are siphoning off the devices we are supposed to call our own.

My Kindle is put into permanent Airplane mode when Amazon stopped providing e-books as downloads. Since then I’m in the quest of finding a good alternate e-book store for my Kindle, which turns out to be surprisingly difficult. I still use and love my Kindle. But it will never see the Internet ever again, it’s now a permanent offline e-book reader.

In my experience is the e-book store situation rather dire, and I think we consumers are part of the problem. We all have shoved more money than we like to admit to Amazon, and they cultivated a de-facto Monopoly on the e-book market until is was too late. Remember the famous Bezos’ quote “Your margin is my opportunity”? Sure there are other ecosystems like the Tolino, but they do not come even close to the comfort and the selection of Amazon. But they aren’t such a surveillance disaster as the Kindle ecosystem.

I do my part in contributing to a solution, by avoiding Amazon as much as I can. I go to the alternative e-book stores. While other e-book stores do not provide the same selection as Amazon, they provide almost everything. Most books I now get from somewhere. The main difficulty is to get DRM-free books, but hey, neither does Amazon.

The book of the friend I wrote above? Yeah, I ordered it via Amazon, because I wanted to support a friend and it was the only place where it was available. It was also no e-book. So be it. The other 9 I didn’t order there but as an epub elsewhere.

And while I still own a Kindle as my e-book reader, I’m happy that it became an offline reader already some time ago. Because then such stories or screenshot still shock me, but at least I don’t feel exposed or naked anymore.

Any my next e-book reader will likely be a Tolino.

Cheers.