These questions have been posed before: are we writing for the book or the reader? Is the modern publishing machine destroying the integrity of the novel? Taking a look at Kobo’s creepy digital reader engagement analytics, Joseph Bernstein tells us to calm down:

It’s true that engagement analytics pose a highly abstract threat to a certain idealized kind of furrowed-brow, human-and-their-word-processor, Great Novel writing and reading, as well as to those people whose livelihoods and self-images are invested in that ideal.