The Gamification of Books: Good Idea, or Bad?

[This article first appeared on Book Business's sister site Teleread]

There was an interesting article in yesterday’s Morning Links about the ‘gamification’ of books. I had first heard this term in response to the Reading Life feature on the Kobo platform, which awards you ‘badges’ for such activities as reading at a certain time in the day, reading a certain number of books, using a dictionary or bookmark feature, and so on. But this article was coming at it from a different aspect: using the ‘concept of game mechanics’ to ‘pull the reader through a book.’