New Kindle feature a soft sell tool for writers?

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Article on the MSNBC Technoblog by Wilson Rothman [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry] leads with the news that the next Kindle OS is going to support “real” page numbers.

That’s a good thing — but what really caught my interest is another upcoming new feature, “Before You Go . . . ” which Rothman says will let readers more easily rate books — and buy new ones:

Just as you’re finishing a book, you’ll now get a “seamless” invitation to rate the book, share it on Twitter or Facebook, and of course, buy more books like it, or by the same author.

It will be interesting to see how this is handled.

On the one hand, this might help writers build audiences. After all, what better time to sell another book than when your scintillating prose is fresh in a reader’s mind?

But I also wonder whether I might personally find it a bit annoying to have my e-reader suggest I take an action of some kind.

Will there be a forced interim step between the last page of a book and the home screen?

Will it seem intrusive?

UPDATE 10/1/2011: New post on how to rate a Kindle book.

2 thoughts on “New Kindle feature a soft sell tool for writers?”

  1. I think being able to rate books inside the kindle is great. It’s sometimes a challenge to recall which was a good book and which was a great book. Imaging 5 years from now when you won’t even remember reading the book, plus you’ll potentially have hundreds of books archived.

    Hopefully we’ll be able to view our own ratings in the archived section.

  2. Hmmmmmm . . . I’ll have to think about that angle — I had not.

    I do hope Amazon doesn’t so overload the Kindle with features that it becomes cumbersome. But I can be a curmudgeon that way. I upgraded to Windows 7 a few months ago and I’m still mad that they’ve replaced the old file manager with “Libraries” — and made it harder (in my experience) to keep track of files . . .

    Re: the Kindle, as a writer, I suspect this functionality has the potential to move some books/authors up from the skinny part of “the long tail” to the . . . er, haunches. I.e. the place on the curve where money can be made . . .

    Thanks for the comment, David.

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