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 Other Down Under
This week saw the release of The Jaguar’s Children, a novel set on the Mexican border that draws on author John Vaillant’s experience in his wife’s home state of Arizona. At The Walrus, Sasha Chapman provides more background on Vaillant in her review of the book, which notes the importance of jaguars in Mexican symbology.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Haruf; Johnson; Bacigalupi; Nichols; Taylor
New this week: Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf; Loving Day by Mat Johnson; The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi; The Rocks by Peter Nichols; and The Shore by Sara Taylor. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
Rona Jaffe Winners Announced
For close to two decades now, the Rona Jaffe Foundation has honored “women writers of exceptional talent in the early stages of their careers” with annual Writers’ Awards worth $30,000 each. This year, the winners are Tiffany Briere (fiction/nonfiction); Ashlee Crews (fiction); Kristen Dombek (nonfiction); Margaree Little (poetry); Kirsten Valdez Quade (fiction); and Jill Sisson Quinn (nonfiction). The winners accepted their awards in a private ceremony on the 19th.
The Power & Popularity of Poetry
In a piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Jonathan Farmer responds to the recent pieces in the New York Times that ask poets to debate the question "does poetry matter?" As Farmer points out, " it's a bit like asking a bunch of religious figures if religion matters," but the conversation is worth following and pairs well with our own recent pieces on poetry's power and popularity.
●
●
One comment:
Add Your Comment: Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
Meta-spoilers contained within
"To read something before it is accessible to all is both a privilege and an unfair advantage." Je Banach's notes on keeping the secrets of the books she writes about (e.g., Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage) are thoughtful, poignant, and tantalizingly spoiler-free.
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Buckley; May; Vallgren; Miller
Out this week: The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley; Paradise City by Elizabeth May; The Merman by Carl-Johan Vallgren; and The Penguin Collected Plays of Arthur Miller. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview.
●
●
David Rees’s New Television Show
Get Your War On creator and How to Sharpen Pencils author David Rees was recently interviewed about his new show on the National Geographic channel. The premise behind the new venture is simple: “anything in the world that seems like there’s nothing to learn about, that’s what we want to learn about.”
●
●
B&N or Bust
We need Barnes & Noble. Alex Shephard writes on the role of the retailer for publishers and readers. You could also check out our series on the Future of the Book.
●
●
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.