a trove of data on children, a group famously difficult to track
March 25, 2021 2:45 PM   Subscribe

This online reading platform that mines kids’ preferences to create new books is deeply creepy (LitHub): "Maybe it’s just because I am an Old, but when I read about the data collection activities of Epic—an online reading platform that, in fairness, is free to schools and has helped kids access digital library books during the pandemic—I was extremely creeped out. [...] The company is using this data to customize reading recommendations, but also to create its own children’s books, including a series called “Cat Ninja,” which has subsequently inspired a spin-off about the eponymous Ninja’s owl sidekick (whose appearance generated a lot of clicks)."

Goodnight Ninja? Knuffle Blobfish? Children’s Books Get the Algorithm Treatment (WSJ paywalled): "A chaotic time-traveling owl named Hoot is at the center of the new children’s book “Time Buddies,” which is now breaking records on the online reading platform Epic. The digital comic book passed one million reads in its first five days last week. Epic predicted as much. It engineered the book to become a hit with kids ages 6 to 10 by basing its new owl heroine partly on children’s preferences and reading habits on the site. When a kid’s sticky fingers search for something to read, Epic captures that activity and feeds the information into its book recommendation engine—a tool that also informs the creation of new titles in-house. [...] Epic now possesses a trove of data on children, a group famously difficult to track. The company has access to real-time data on how many children read a book, how long they engage with it, how often they pick it up and put it down and their interest starts to flag." Related: Reading Platform Epic Had An Epic Year (Forbes)
posted by not_the_water (63 comments total) 21 users marked this as a favorite
 
yes, let's mine the children's data
posted by firstdaffodils at 3:03 PM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


Oof. I want to be outraged... but our kiddo loves Cat Ninja.
posted by EllaEm at 3:05 PM on March 25, 2021 [7 favorites]


And this is why no one will pay me to write children's books (because I haven't stolen all of my ideas from a hundred thousand children's brain).
posted by dng at 3:07 PM on March 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


But to be serious for a moment: Epic is a really really good product. We tried a lot of different reading apps, and Epic is far and away the best in terms of usability and actual content. If they get something that good by collecting and learning from readers' data...? I'm honestly not as upset as I feel I ought to be.
posted by EllaEm at 3:09 PM on March 25, 2021 [12 favorites]


Things were much better when I was a kid, and there was nothing I enjoyed at all.
posted by turbid dahlia at 3:13 PM on March 25, 2021 [30 favorites]


It makes perfect sense for Epic to do this because ebooks allow them to track so much reading behaviour. And isn't it a good thing? It helps them make books that kids will want to read. I guess the logical extreme is where the books become the equivalent of free-to-play games where they're just manufacturing dopamine hits and you need to pay to get more of them but it doesn't sound like we're there yet.

Are they adjusting their recommendations to prioritize the books they've created over other ones? Because that would feel sketchier to me.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 3:16 PM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


LitHub link isn't working for me. I just get WSJ...?
posted by esoteric things at 3:37 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


When I first heard about the kids show Dinosaur Train I wondered if they just mashed together two things kids loved and built a story around it. Turns out that was exactly what they did! And my nephew loved that show, and learned as much as one can hope from a PBS edutainment program, and it seemed decent enough.

There are things to worry about a company datamining kids' reading habits and preferences. But if they're using that data to learn kids want stories about cat ninjas, and give them stories about cat ninjas in response, that itself barely ticks my personal creepometer.
posted by traveler_ at 3:45 PM on March 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


A cat ninja, you say?

So, er...where might one find this story about the aforementioned cat ninja?

(Asking for...a friend.)
posted by darkstar at 3:55 PM on March 25, 2021 [11 favorites]


My daughter has been using it this past year via her public school and she discovered a series we've transitioned to reading in print (Sarah Mlynowski's Whatever After books) and, in the weekly emails I'm sent detailing her reading, the bulk of the titles appear to be ones that exist as actual titles from conventional publishers vs. algorithmic content, and decent quality.

I assume they've possibly gotten some basic demographic data about her via the school - they definitely have her grade level - and we had to enter a bit when we registered so she could use some of the features (we just entered a fake birth date), but, in the overflowing sewer that is kid-targeted apps, it so far strikes me as relatively innocuous. No arm-twisting in-app purchases in the educational version, for example.

She likes to read in print, but also seems genuinely excited by some of the books she's found via Epic, and likes to talk about them with us. So far, it hasn't set off my fairly cynical set of alarm bells WRT this kind of thing.
posted by ryanshepard at 3:57 PM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


So how long do you think before they're just feeding keywords into GPT-3 to flood the market with algorythmically generated books?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 3:57 PM on March 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


Squeee! The paperback editions of Cat Ninja are available on Amazon!

And there’s even a trailer!!

Ahem. I mean...very good, and all.
posted by darkstar at 4:00 PM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


I feel like the Strathmore Syndicate was doing this a long time ago, albeit without computers. It's a very successful strategy. Find topics kids like, write outlines of books, then hire ghost writers to churn out books to match. Track which books sell well, and make more like those.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:03 PM on March 25, 2021 [11 favorites]


Enid Blyton was the human version of this process a long time ago. She wrote 762 books and sometimes as many as 50 a year.
posted by benzenedream at 4:17 PM on March 25, 2021 [11 favorites]


Epic’s team knows that children prefer owls to chickens and chickens to hedgehogs. Kids hunt for unicorns almost twice as often as they look for mermaids. Volcanoes are more popular than tsunamis, which are more popular than earthquakes. The Titanic is bigger than cowboys, pizza is bigger than cake, science is bigger than art and “poop” is bigger than all of them.

How much did Epic pay for these insights? They seem legit, but also obvious. Except for the Titanic. None of the kids I know give two poops about the Titanic (though most would know it's "bigger" than a cowboy, if asked).
posted by chavenet at 4:19 PM on March 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


The 600 series didn’t even rhyme. We spotted them easy. But these are new. Fart jokes, cultural references for the parents, implausible motivations for barnyard animals. I had to wait until it tried selling you something before I spotted it.
posted by condour75 at 4:20 PM on March 25, 2021 [18 favorites]


Enid Blyton was the human version of this process a long time ago. She wrote 762 books and sometimes as many as 50 a year.

Holy crap! From Wikipedia:
Some libraries and schools banned her works ... because they were perceived to lack literary merit.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 4:25 PM on March 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


I would worry more about the long-term effects this will have on preferences, the ability of authors to get paid for their work, and the willingness of children to struggle with difficult content that doesn't immediately appeal to them.

In terms of reading level, you can gradually push them up (if that's the goal) using the educational theory of the zone of proximal development - always show a book that's a little harder than the last one but still within what the kids can handle.

In terms of themes, complexity, grey thinking, not straightforward morals, it seems like our mass entertainment (and anything generated by popularity metrics is mass entertainment) is getting dumber every year. I think it decreases empathy when every story has a clear moral and clear heroes and villains, but that's what people overwhelmingly prefer.
posted by subdee at 4:33 PM on March 25, 2021 [18 favorites]


And I also think our society will continue to stratify, people who are bespoke-taught by other people (including by parents who read difficult books to children and explain difficult concepts to them) in the upper class, and people who are mass-taught by machines in the lower class.
posted by subdee at 4:36 PM on March 25, 2021 [12 favorites]


On the third hand, this sounds better - much better - than a program like Reading Plus where students need to spend a certain number of hours a week reading low-quality articles and answering multiple choice questions about them. It seems to work to improve their comprehension but after a while the kids reach the highest level and literally see the same articles again. Just expanding the library and giving them more choice about what they read would be a huge improvement.
posted by subdee at 4:40 PM on March 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


I dug up the LitHub blog post here; it's a blurb from the WSJ article and the phrase "Maybe I'm being too precious, but" followed by the author being too precious.
posted by phooky at 4:43 PM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


Because you know what the librarians say - it doesn't matter what the kids are reading as long as they are reading.
posted by subdee at 4:44 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Also also also - didn't we just ban youtube from collecting so much data about children????
posted by subdee at 4:46 PM on March 25, 2021 [4 favorites]


So how long do you think before they're just feeding keywords into GPT-3 to flood the market with algorythmically generated books?

BRB, going to retire.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:46 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Because you know what the librarians say - it doesn't matter what the kids are reading as long as they are reading.

I've been a librarian for over 20 years*, and you're much - much - more likely to get a grumpy, highly opinionated diatribe about the relative merits of different kinds of kids' literature out of us, in my experience.

Admittedly, I'm not a children's librarian. There may well be librarians out there that think this way, I've just never encountered or drank with them.
posted by ryanshepard at 4:54 PM on March 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


95% of kids books have zero actual value (and like 99% of mass-market adult fiction has zero value) but getting kids to read is a good thing, so I can't get worked up about Cat Ninja. Making data-driven decisions is a good thing as long as it's not the only thing.

Also also also - didn't we just ban youtube from collecting so much data about children????

So YouTube is probably just complying with COPPA. And I'm no COPPA expert but one of the items under "Personal Information" is "A persistent identifier that can be used to recognize a user over time and across different websites or online services" and on that front Google & YouTube operate a lot differently than Epic probably does. Again, I am very much not an expert but if Epic doesn't share the data then they can probably still collect a lot of data as long as it doesn't involve collecting "personal information" as defined in COPPA. But as far as I know, COPPA doesn't prohibit all data collection, just personal data and cross-site data.
posted by GuyZero at 4:57 PM on March 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


And I also think our society will continue to stratify, people who are bespoke-taught by other people (including by parents who read difficult books to children and explain difficult concepts to them) in the upper class, and people who are mass-taught by machines in the lower class.

If only there was a very well-known science fiction book about this.
posted by GuyZero at 4:59 PM on March 25, 2021 [11 favorites]


If only there was a very well-known science fiction book about this.

I love The Diamond Age, it's my favorite Neal Stephenson book... Anathem is about this too, but takes it a step further into a society stratified by the length of your attention span.

I've been a librarian for over 20 years*, and you're much - much - more likely to get a grumpy, highly opinionated diatribe about the relative merits of different kinds of kids' literature out of us, in my experience.

Hah! My grandmother was a children's librarian, and my best friend is a children's librarian. They'd be privately in favor of any reading, but you're right about their private opinions :P
posted by subdee at 5:11 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


Thank you guys for the clarifications about COPPA also.
posted by subdee at 5:11 PM on March 25, 2021


What's great is that by enabling geolocation on your child's e-reading device, eventually the company will have the option of weighing your child's life time value with the option of contacting the police because you left them in a Wal-Mart parking lot with their kindle, fire, or apple product that just sent your location to them... Maaaaybe you haven't been a good enough reader this month - or your kid is cresting to that age where they are going to stop using their app... a good visit by local law enforcement might do the trick to keep you in line and reading about Ninja Cat well into your child's adulthood. Don't worry, they have enough stories.
posted by Nanukthedog at 5:21 PM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


At least my two favorite kids series, Barf-o-Rama (yes, this is for real) and Captain Underpants, were created by people and not some corporate robot.
posted by njohnson23 at 5:23 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


But as far as I know, COPPA doesn't prohibit all data collection, just personal data and cross-site data.

It doesn't explicitly prevent any collection, it just puts rules and regulations into place about the collection and how it's used, how it's disclosed and to who, who has to give consent for the collection, etc.

But, like lots of of other privacy/security regulations (such as PCI DSS for credit cards), it makes life much easier and cheaper for entities to just forgo that collection if they have no use for it. Or, perhaps prevent humans younger than 13 from using the service if they want to do that collection with the least hassle.
posted by sideshow at 5:44 PM on March 25, 2021


I love and use epic for my dyslexic daughter BUT I emailed them a complaint they never responded to and now monitor more closely what my kid is seeing because their in-app promotional page has a curated section on “Brand’s you love” promoting books about MacDonald’s, Lego, Sanrio etc which felt like blatant marketing to me.

However they do have a modest section of queerish comics and books like Lumberjanes that my kid ferreted out and enjoyed, and a lot of graphic novels that our local library just doesn’t carry.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:46 PM on March 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


When I first heard about the kids show Dinosaur Train I wondered if they just mashed together two things kids loved and built a story around it... And my nephew loved that show, and learned as much as one can hope from a PBS edutainment program, and it seemed decent enough.

Well apart from how Buddy was going to get his meals when he grew up, that is.
posted by y2karl at 5:46 PM on March 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


the company will have the option of ... contacting the police because you left them in a Wal-Mart parking lot

Nope. COPPA violation.

Captain Underpants [was] created by people and not some corporate robot.

Pretty sure Captain Underpants was also created simply by jamming together two things kids love: superheroes and potty talk.

And note that the selection bias at play in this story: they haven't told us about the 12 books that were designed based on reading data that failed. Every success story is a case study in selection bias.
posted by GuyZero at 5:46 PM on March 25, 2021 [3 favorites]


And I also think our society will continue to stratify, people who are bespoke-taught by other people (including by parents who read difficult books to children and explain difficult concepts to them) in the upper class, and people who are mass-taught by machines in the lower class.

This ain't new. The time and knowledge level of parents and the classes to which kids are assigned in school, usually as a result of learning at home, have been a thing since before I was born.

I have little faith that technology will be used to help advance kids who are otherwise being left behind, but it certainly could be done if the will existed. Past a certain point, kids learn on their own when given the opportunity. The use of technology to enable independent learning could be a game changer for many,
posted by wierdo at 6:10 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


There is absolutely nothing new about corporations creating Extruded Children's Entertainment Product, it's been happening for as long as entertaining children has been a capitalist industry. The difference here is specifically how this company is tracking kid interests and responding to them faster than anyone ever has before.

Our only hope is that children really are impossible to predict and will cling to incredibly weird stuff not meant to appeal to children, like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:23 PM on March 25, 2021 [9 favorites]


Cat Ninja and My Pet Slime may not be great literature, but the boxes of Nancy Drews I consumed as a child weren't exactly full of literary merit either.

When I say boxes, I mean that someone salvaged boxes and boxes of water-damaged Nancy Drews from a church basement, 1930s - 1980s editions, which meant I ended up reading the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s versions of The Secret of the Old Clock.

I don't love the data-tracking, but that is definitely my old-timey ideas about privacy. The Kids are only too happy to share everything on TikTok.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:31 PM on March 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


Captain Underpants (and Dogman, which is a spin-off) was for sure written by a human with a creative vision. How you can tell is 1) they are legitimately good, if weird, and 2) there are only so many volumes. If there are more than 10 volumes in the series you should immediately be suspicious and sample a few to figure out what is up.

I am a children's librarian and a lot of kid lit is garbage, much like a lot of adult literature. The Catch-22 is that if you don't want your kid to read garbage, cut off their access to garbage...but kids do better with reading if they can choose what they read, and many will choose garbage because their tastes are not yet developed. I'm afraid the adults just have to decide they're drawing the line and what else they can offer to balance what else they're reading. I would hope that kids read something that isn't terrible, but I would also rather them read that than not.

I am not looking forward to all the requests I'm going to have for titles that come from Epic that we literally cannot buy for any price because the library doesn't have access due to e-book licensing nonsense-- at this point my main concern here. We already have that with leveled reader systems that schools buy into, where a kid is a level N or Orange or 7 and they're not allowed to read above or below their level, and parents don't know enough to know the system is not the end-all and be-all of books but rather something making book selection as engaging and interesting as selecting deli meat.

I don't really see any difference between the garbage that a team of humans came up with using old-fashioned market data and focus groups (for example, the oeuvre of Daisy Meadows) vs. garbage drawn from non-personally-identifiable click data from an app. My personal line is TV or toy-marketing tie-ins, which I try to de-prioritize despite the fact that they circ like hotcakes. Part of the problem is that our educational system is broken and has been for decades, and worrying about this app isn't going to solve that, really.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:31 PM on March 25, 2021 [14 favorites]


The thing about this article is that it hints at there being something here (the warning from the watchdog group, the lack of transparency in policies), but the examples are essentially benign (which animals are more popular subjects for books). If you’re going to tease me that children are having their privacy violated, you need to tell me something scary about it.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:36 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


If my years on the internet have taught me anything about algorithms, it's just a matter of time until it spits out Cat Ninja and the Jewish Moon Landing Hoax.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:43 PM on March 25, 2021 [15 favorites]


seanmpuckett: I feel like the Strathmore Syndicate was doing this a long time ago, albeit without computers. It's a very successful strategy. Find topics kids like, write outlines of books, then hire ghost writers to churn out books to match. Track which books sell well, and make more like those.

Before being better known as the publisher behind Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc, the Stratemeyer Syndicate did achieve great success doing pretty much that. Take new technology and add some boys.

This book was a fascinating read on the topic.
posted by dr_dank at 6:47 PM on March 25, 2021


But it's not like the books are written, illustrated, and narrated by algorithms, right? They use reading prefernces to decide on themes, not plot lines and jokes. How is it different from doing market research the old fashioned way? I mean, you're still going to land on the insight that kids like poop, superheroes, and dinosaurs?(honestly, the fact they needed an algorithm to discover that...) The thing that matters is still whether the writing is good and the production decent, and that comes down to creative human beings who are good at writing and producing.
posted by EllaEm at 6:53 PM on March 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


Somewhere I read that if you're not paying for it, then your imagination is the product, or something like that...
posted by halfbuckaroo at 7:02 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


There's a strong argument to be made that it would be better for children's literature to be made by writers and artists who own the work they make and have a clear vision and desire to make work that engages and challenges children, rather than corporate Extruded Children's Entertainment Product made by work-for-hire writers and artists who have no control over what they're told to make. But that's certainly not a problem that started with Epic, or even started within any of our lifetimes.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 7:05 PM on March 25, 2021 [6 favorites]


I guess I'm suspicious of "literary merit" when it comes to children's books, because the topic is infamously political. The New York Public Library didn't carry Goodnight Moon for decades because the head children's librarian thought the author, and the entire literary circle she was in, wrote bad books that children should not be exposed to; that librarian herself had gone to bat for children's literature as a genre, which was usually seen as indulgent pap (cue Dorothy Parker's famous quote about Winnie The Pooh: "And it is that word “hummy,” my darlings, that marks the first place in “The House at Pooh Corner” at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.")

So not necessarily willing to write off Epic's data-driven approach as inherently bad, but I'd definitely wonder in what direction their ambitions are going to expand. Are they going to use this approach for writing a book that tots want to read to make their output more intellectually nourishing without making it didactic and boring? Or do their ambitions lie in making something that's so smoothed over that kids don't even have to read the story?
posted by Merus at 7:15 PM on March 25, 2021 [5 favorites]


OK so I have a bunch of lived experience with Epic. I have two kids, one elementary school age one slightly older. They love reading and graphic novels. We have bookshelves pretty much anywhere. Not fancy BoBo library ladder ones, just small shelves throughout the house because they always want books.

It has been a year at home and they. Have. Read. Everything. Multiple times. They are so bored. It's exhausting trying to come up with activities.

Our small library has opened for 20-minute browse appointments, that's not really enough time to get into much longer fiction, and they have basically cleaned out the sections for their ages, especially the graphic novels. We still go but it's usually for picking things to re-read that weren't available last time.

Right before things shut down a year ago, we made one last trip and loaded up with about 80 books. The librarian helped us out. She knew it was only a matter of time before the doors would close and those books would sit for months. Several families teamed up and swapped the library books among us to "circulate." We have the Libby online e-book library and it is a joke - kids titles have hold times of 12 weeks to a year. There's not enough in the system and too much demand. Try telling an 8 year old that they should wait till their next birthday to read the next book in a series.

So one of the kids started using Epic through school and I paid the $7 a month for a premium version. I think it takes away ads, I don't know, but it removes the limit that it can only be used during school hours. One account seems to work on unlimited devices so they both share. It is now the primary way that things are read in the house right now because the selection is endless and there's no waiting, and a low bar to try something new and abandon if it is not good.

And there's a lot of good stuff there. All of Phoebe and her Unicorn. At least five runs of Adventure Time. I believe most of Avatar the Last Airbender and Legend of Korra. Lumberjanes. There's no limits and no hold waiting time.

I'm normally anti-data mining but in this case I'm ambivalent. Take the library - I don't want a dossier on my personal reading tastes, but I do want them to know which titles are popular and when. When I try and put a hold on a book and I see I'm like 178th in line, I'm always like, come on, get a few more copies? I also struggle to get the kids to branch out and try new books, especially novels. I have to bargain - like read the first 30 pages then you can bail. Or I'll read the first three chapters aloud and then just leave the book conspicuously lying around the house. For that reason I'm OK with some data analysis to make suggestions that they might actually like
posted by sol at 7:27 PM on March 25, 2021 [11 favorites]


It's good to know that children's authors have been doing it wrong this whole time.
posted by 7segment at 7:40 PM on March 25, 2021


More than we like to admit, a lot of adult decision making about what children want has a lot of intrinsic bias. People either remember their own childhood (but things have changed), or they look at their own children (who have their own biases), or they ask their neice or nephew something and treat it as gospel.

Actually creating things more than a handful of convenient children want is not a bad thing.
posted by effugas at 7:40 PM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


think it decreases empathy when every story has a clear moral and clear heroes and villains

Hmmm, I wonder if Watchmen Babies exists. It must, surely.

My only recent mashup success with our two year old was "Animals On The Bus", which is just The Wheels On The Bus with an endless succession of animal sounds.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:47 PM on March 25, 2021 [2 favorites]


On googling, Simpson's Did It, literally. Could be a good read though!
posted by Jon Mitchell at 7:48 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


The Enid Blyton Book of Bunnies
The Enid Blyton Book of Bunnies
The Enid Blyton Book of Bunnies
posted by clavdivs at 10:27 PM on March 25, 2021 [1 favorite]


blnkfrnk Captain Underpants . . . was for sure written by a human with a creative vision
More of that, so! Fiction presents us with different ways to be human and alive. If The Lit Man takes what we / the kids are reading now and uses that data to generate more copy then choice regresses to the mean and the echo chamber gets boomier. Bring on the dancing unicorns aardvarks!
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:53 AM on March 26, 2021 [1 favorite]


"The Titanic is bigger than cowboys, pizza is bigger than cake, science is bigger than art and “poop” is bigger than all of them.

How much did Epic pay for these insights? They seem legit, but also obvious. Except for the Titanic. None of the kids I know give two poops about the Titanic"

The math was right there. Of course kids don't give two poops for a titanic. The titanic is not even worth one poop. I sure hope your not buying any kid produced NFTs!
posted by srboisvert at 4:50 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


a series called “Cat Ninja,” which has subsequently inspired a spin-off about the eponymous Ninja’s owl sidekick

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to Nijo
  In beautiful pitch-black coats.
They took some shuriken, and also nunchaku,
  Creeping over the moat in a boat.
The Owl looked up at the walls above,
  And whispered while starting to climb,
"O lovely Ninja! O Ninja, my love,
  What a beautiful Ninja you are,
    You are,
    You are!
What a beautiful Ninja you are!"
posted by rory at 7:06 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


Just standing up for Titanic interest being a legit thing for at least one kid. My coworker's son was obsessed with the Titanic for a period of time - might still be, but I get fewer Douglas updates since his mom started teleworking during the pandemic. But their family drove from Baltimore, MD to Pigeon Forge, TN so he could go to the Titanic Museum for his ninth birthday. My sample size of kids that age is small at the moment, so I assumed he's just a weirdo. I am kind of tickled to learn that may not be the case!

I am personally more surprised chickens beat out hedgehogs in children's interest levels. Hedgehogs are the best, what is wrong with kids these days!?!!!!

Also, yeah, can't get too worked up about this as insidious data mining or the end of children's literature or whatever. Kids want to read everything about "x" cool thing, but that phase helps them learn that not all books about "x" are equally good. And yeah, Cat Ninja sounds fun.
posted by the primroses were over at 7:30 AM on March 26, 2021


Re the Titanic, the children's book series 'I Survived' has surged in popularity at my library in the last couple years.

I can't imagine why.
posted by box at 8:43 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


Wonder if Epic has "Attack on Titan?" in the collection; seems likely no but won't stop kids from trying, and mebbe their autocomplete moves queries to titanic instead.
posted by pwnguin at 8:58 AM on March 26, 2021


My 8-year-old used Epic to go on a multi-month-long binge of Smurfs comic books, resulting in some very weird conversations around the house about the political and economic structure of Smurf world. These are conversations I don’t remember having with my parents in the 1980s, so I guess my kid is learning?

He says that Cat Ninja is OK and the owl spin-off is fine, but Adventure Kingdom is better. He is obsessed with leveling up and earning “badges” like “Sir Reads A Lot” (he has them memorized). It was a real tragedy when he had to switch distance learning classes and he lost all his badges and had to start over. Right now he’s trying to re-earn the badge for reading 200 books, so I agree with sol - there’s no way the library could keep up with our bored pandemic kids.

Also, as a person with much professional experience with the other Epic (EHR), what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall to see Judy ranting about another company using “her” brand name.
posted by Maarika at 10:43 AM on March 26, 2021 [2 favorites]


I'm surprised and disheartened to find so many shrug/meh/welcome overlords responses here. I'm not only concerned with the inevitable race to the middle, as BobtheScientist points out. Kids' books are about so much more than learning to read -- they instill worldview and social norms. How many times did we hear about how the current generation of youth activists were brought up on the Harry Potter books, and how that primed them to stand up to powerful adults? What you read as a child is deeply affects how you perceive yourself and what is expected of you.

When companies collect data, engineer appeal, and then serve up irresistible content they have incredible power to shape the way their consumers think. Maybe right now Epic is merely playing the "let's make more money!" angle by burping up otherwise benign Cat Ninja books, that have no agenda other than getting you to buy another. But how long until political interests take notice? We've seen it happen again and again: We've got enormous numbers of people addicted to sugar and screens. Fifteen years ago Facebook was a fun way to connect with friends, now social media is a legit weapon. All of it intentionally accomplished by interests who watch every move we make and then serve us up tantalizing bits of the same until we're so helplessly in their thrall that they can make us believe anything they give us is what we want.

There's another whole argument to made about how a book is not (or ought not be) a comforting reinforcement of things we already know and like, but an invitation into another human's head and experience. But honestly, that feels like a second order concern, because the kind of engineering Epic is up to feels like it could lead to places worse than Zombie Consumer Alley.
posted by apparently at 10:50 AM on March 26, 2021 [10 favorites]


But how long until political interests take notice? We've seen it happen again and again: We've got enormous numbers of people addicted to sugar and screens.

Part of the reason I feel meh about the example here is that the example is so incredibly lame. Threatening me with a slippery slope of children’s book data mining in a world where Amazon knows what passages of books you highlight, where I’ve already had to go through a round of freaking out over Youtube Kids, where the media already responds to trend indicators over what’s popular, where cigarette companies created Joe Camel, where politicians write children’s books, and where, yes, people already use data to advertise to you, this example of a company figuring out that it should make a book about an owl because people like owls is just such a nothing case. The article feels like scaremongering because we have some sense of what using data for bad purposes actually looks like.

If I want to get worked up, it bothers me that Epic is perhaps less transparent than it should be about how the data is used. But there's just got to be more to go on.
posted by Going To Maine at 5:34 PM on March 26, 2021 [3 favorites]


But honestly, that feels like a second order concern, because the kind of engineering Epic is up to feels like it could lead to places worse than Zombie Consumer Alley

The Disney items are over in aisle 7.
posted by benzenedream at 6:50 AM on March 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


yeah, I think that's why I'm ultimately not bothered by this - it's not even the biggest company named Epic that makes a product that children go bananas for. The amount of damage this can do when inevitably abused seems relatively contained, and it's not even the best example of using data mining to engineer a product that's bad for its audience.
posted by Merus at 7:35 AM on March 27, 2021 [1 favorite]


« Older I Don't Know Why You Invited Us   |   Canada's climate plan survives legal challenge Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments