Though I agree that it represents a somewhat creepy invasion of privacy, I can’t stop reading Amazon’s new list of what readers are highlighting on their Kindles. The Amazon e-book device allows readers to highlight 
a passage in a book simply by dragging a cursor across it, and somehow (we don’t really want to know how, do we?) Amazon is tracking these selections and reporting them to the whole wide world.
At Amazon.com, one list displays the Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, with “all time” presumably referring to the two and a half years since the Kindle was introduced. A second list aims to identify what’s trendy by reporting Recently Heavily Highlighted Passages. The current number one on the “all-time” list is this passage from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: “Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.” Why did this passage hit home for 1,742 Kindle users? Are they unhappy in their jobs? Searching for fulfillment? Mad at their boss? I also couldn’t help but notice that the dominant book on the all-time list is The Shack, with SIX of the top 10 passages. Here’s a sampler of what readers choose to highlight from William P. Young’s allegorical Christian novel: “Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception—what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too.” Hmm. Perhaps they were highlighting that passage so they could figure out what it means?
My personal favorite passage is this one from The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which has been highlighted by 581 Kindle users (so far): “Is it so small a thing to have enjoyed the sun, to have lived light in the spring, to have loved, to have thought, to have done, to have advanced true friends?” It’s a lovely sentence and one that I might have marked myself.
Do you highlight passages in books as you read them? And what do you think of Amazon’s new effort to track and report what readers are doing on their Kindles?
Amazon’s use of Kindle to track highlights is creepy.
I never highlight. Only one passage in one book seemed worth saving. I copied it:
From Josephine Hart’s “Sin”
“We are here to add to the sum of human goodness. To prove the thing exists. And however futile each individual act of courage or generosity, self-sacrifice or grace-it still proves the thing exists. Each act adds to the fund. It needs replenishment. Not only because evil flourishes, and is, most indefensibly, defended. But because goodness is no longer a respectable aim in life. The hound of hell, envy, has driven it from the house.”
I’m a big underliner (in pencil, and generally only on ARCS or galleys, before I get attacked for ruining my books). I’m a fan of preserving books, but I’m also a fan of loving my books, and if you show your love with underlines, notes and dog-ears, I say have at it.
Amazon tracking is a little creepy, though. The passages I choose are often personal, esp. when I add a note to myself, and sometimes I opt not to lend out a book when I feel I’ve marked it too much to share. Amazon making that decision for me would just be… weird.
Thanks for sharing the links, though, I hadn’t seen this before!
Also, why is the Kindle in the picture so much larger than that person’s hand!?
Either a very small hand or Amazon’s effort to make the Kindle look larger than life??
As a new Kindle owner, I am going to go with CREEPY. I think that pic is out of proportion because they are bordering on Big Brother-like tracking practices and it’s very disturbing.
I’m okay with it; it’s not creepy at all.
I’d guess that it works because amazon.com keep track of one’s progress through a KindleBook: if I get to a certain spot on Gremlin’s Kindle, then open the book using the emulator in Gremlin’s Tower or Gremlin’s Laptop, the offsite system remembers where I was; if the emulator [or another physical Kindle on the same account] were tracking passages, they’d show up across the board; that makes sense to me.
That amazon.com are tracking popular passages as a matter of trivia is okay too. It’s not really mentioning who highlit what, let alone why; it’s just noting that X million people made a note of a given sentence in a given book. In the worstcase, that might be something of a spoiler issue if a given passage from a given novel gives away a given detail; but that’s no worse than the same information lurking at wikiquote.org to be tripped across.
As a writer myself, I don’t hate the idea that some pithy oneliner in a given book could conceivably help to advertise the whole. If that oneliner gives something away, that’s only as annoying as word of mouth telling the world in advance that the butler did it. And, that amazon.com are tracking this information was never a secret; it’s actually a selling point for the Kindle: swap devices, and your bookmarks and notes follow the file, not the machine.
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