Brilliant Idea: Kindle Can Do for Books What Last.fm Did for Music

Digital reading platforms can collect previously unheralded data about how we read books--and that could change the way we buy them.

Zoinks, this is clever. Paul Lamere, an app developer in the online music industry and a blogger about the same, points out that one often overlooked feature of Amazon's Kindle might change the way we buy books by gathering some smart metrics.

Lamere specifically points to Whispersync, a feature that keeps track of where you are in a book and syncs that data...