Remember that old Yakov Smirnoff joke? Neither do I. But now it looks like some American books will be learning their students thanks to CourseAnalytics, a new program by e-text giants CourseSmart which monitors how individual students are reading their e-books—how long they spend on each page or chapter, what they're skipping, what they're rereading, and so on.

It aggregates the data and gives each student an "engagement score" that doesn't test intelligence, knowledge, or critical thinking, but how fastidiously someone sticks to the assignment. That could have its uses, if a teacher were unable to gauge his or her students by, you know, talking to them and stuff.

And this Slate story points out the obvious creepiness of books reading students:

Their enthusiasm for this scheme makes sense: It might help teachers identify difficult material in the textbooks so they can be sure to go over it in class. The system's next version will also feature a special dashboard so publishers can see student interaction with their textbooks...

But there's also something eerie about this scheme. Imagine a literature class in which students are assigned to read about George Orwell's 1984 using electronic textbooks that spy on them as they read.

That's not so farfetched. This month, CourseSmart proudly announced its international expansion to Africa and the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Syria, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Turkey, and Iran.

I can't imagine Saudi or Iranian authorities not wanting to keep a closer eye on what its college students are reading—or deciding not to read—for class.