Amazon is now aggregating the data from the “highlighting” feature on the Kindle to find out what text is highlighted the most across all Kindle users. Amazon is calling the feature “Most Highlighted Passages of All Time” and the results couldn’t be more boring. (via)
Kindle Highlights and Lowlights
The Girl With the Pigtails
Could it be for the best that Lisbeth Salander outlived her creator? Do writers own the rights to their own superstar characters, or do the rights belong to the readers? These questions and more are explored in a fascinating essay from The Atlantic. Here’s a Millions piece in which Pippi Longstocking is touted as Salander’s literary forebear.
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Believing in the Bookternet
Recommended Viewing: Year in Reading alumna Rachel Fershleiser’s TED talk “Why I heart the Bookternet” on building reading communities through the internet. “The more tools that we get for communication and collaboration, the more we’re taking reading and writing — these really solitary pursuits — and building communities around them for connection and conversation.”
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Verse Play
“A must-read for: anyone who has grappled with mood disorders/And: anyone interested in the nature of creativity/And: anyone interested in insightful stories told with honesty, pathos, and wit.” On Ellen Forney’s Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michaelangelo & Me.
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A Front-Row Seat
For the most part, Alexis de Tocqueville had good things to say about the young United States in his book Democracy in America, which is probably why we tend to forget that he thought Americans weren’t funny. What de Tocqueville missed, according to a new history of American humor, is the extent to which American funniness emerged from subversive groups of outsiders. In Bookforum, Ben Schwartz takes stock of the arguments in American Fun.
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Reading Lolita at Twelve
At the Paris Review Daily, Nick Antosca reminisces on reading Lolita at 12: “Who among my seventh-grade classmates, I wondered with a frisson, was such a creature? What girl had that ‘soul-shattering, insidious charm’ that, while invisible to me, made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?”
Taking Bets on the Nobel Prize
Popular bookmakers Ladbrokes have announced their opening odds for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Smart money seems to favor Haruki Murakami, who would surely take the prize if it depended on recent book sales. Meanwhile the next two favorites are Joyce Carol Oates (6/1) and Hungarian author Péter Nádas (7/1). All signs point to this being another year of disappointment for Philip Roth’s fans – his odds of winning stand at 16/1.
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This feature is ON by default and I just found out today by accident. I was in the middle of a page, and there it was suddenly staring at me: a highlighted paragraph. I thought my device had gone nuts!
If I wanted a highlighted, commented book I would buy a used book in poor condition. Now, why would I want to recreate that experience on my Kindle?
Not only are these highlights an obnoxious distraction, but they can also serve as spoilers. Amazon should give you the option of enabling highlights when you start reading, instead of assuming everyone loves marked and commented books. I hate it when people highlight library books and now I have to put up with it on my e-books?
It took me several minutes to find out how to turn it off, but in the brief time it was active, this feature interfered with my reading: I had to stop, go online, read half a dozen articles about this topic where the only concern was people worried about their privacy, and by then my reading time was up.