Haha... like your analogy. That's exactly right!!
The question for me is, how is it all going to influence the creation of future books? For me as an artist it is important to create my very own, original thing and not produce for a market... but what if all the tracking and evaluating leads to increased production of only those things people seem to like? Sure, you get more of what you like... but what about variety and new things?
For sure - the "outsider artist" is going to be increasingly marginalized.
I think that's happened to a great extent already. In the music industry, don't most of the tracks on Soundcloud and Spotify have zero listens? And then there's the drivel put out by Katy Perry that gets literally billions of views. And a song takes five minutes to listen to. With a book, you've got to convince a reader to spend six hours with your words.
As a painter, I think you have an advantage. It only takes a second to catch someone's eye with something unique.
Absolutely agree. As for the advantage of a visual artist, it works both ways... it only takes a second to look at something else. And we have never been bombarded with images the way we are today....