A colleague sent me a link to a slightly creepy article in the New York Times in which (as he neatly put it) ‘GCHQ meets CMT’. It seems that it’s not just governments and social media outfits that are intent on spying on us. It’s also publishers, who thanks to the burgeoning of ebooks are pioneering new ways of knowing what we read and how we respond to it.

There are all sorts of ways in which such information might be used, but the article seems to be most excited about the possibility of taking a focus-group approach to creative writing. Just as a big-budget movie might be tested out on an audience to find ways of increasing its appeal prior to general release, so novelists will now be able to find out what their readers like and ‘give them more of it’. I recoil in horror from the whole idea, but doubtless it will help someone somewhere to make a fast buck…