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One Sci-Fi Author Wrote 29 of the Kindle's 100 Most-Highlighted Passages
An anonymous reader writes "Today Amazon announced that a science fiction writer has become the Kindle's all-time best-selling author. Last June Suzanne Collins, who wrote the Hunger Games trilogy, was only the fourth author to sell one million ebooks, but this month Amazon announced she'd overtaken all her competition (and she also wrote the #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks this Christmas). In fact, 29 of the 100 most-highlighted passages on the Kindle were written by Collins, including 7 of the top 10. And on a separate list of recent highlights, Collins has written 17 of the top 20 most-highlighted passages."
It's pretty interesting to go through the top-100 list and look at the passages people think are worth highlighting. Taken out of context, many of them could be patched together and re-sold as a self-help book. None are quite so eloquent as #18 in the recent highlights.
I read book one of the series, and it was quite good. Much better than I expected. I have no idea how they are going to make the movie rated PG-13, considering all the awful stuff that happens to the kids in the book.
What is going on here? Amazon is collecting data on what passages we highlight?
What other data are they collecting?
I am going to re-read their end user agreement again before I buy any more books from them.
It's a recent publication that is required reading in a lot of schools. Of course a lot of it is highlighted, those are the answers to the tests.
Gee, how shocking. A book which is getting a lot of advertising push in the run-up to a movie release just happens to be getting highlighted in an Amazon bookstore function designed to let you see what's popular. Gosh, I guess it must just be practically scientifically, objectively the most read book right now. You should probably buy it and check it out!
Which #18 is the summary referring to?
"Press and hold, then drag your finger across text to select it. A dialog box will appear that lets you highlight the text, add a note, and so on. If several other Kindle users have highlighted a particular passage in the book you are reading, you will see that passage underlined. You can turn off these Popular Highlights in Settings. Notes appear as superscripted numbers within the text. To view a note the next time you visit that page, simply tap on the number."
or
"“Panem et Circenses translates into ‘Bread and Circuses.’ The writer was saying that in return for full bellies and entertainment, his people had given up their political responsibilities and therefore their power.”"?
They're both oddly appropriate for self-help...
Agree with the sentiment. Disagree with the tone.
Its nice for an author to be recognized.
It would also be nice to see success for eBooks that can't succeed as paper.
Not relevant to the topic at hand, but I notice my submission is listed as being authored (yes, Slashdot news crew, I wrote the content myself - you should try it, it's liberating) by "Anonymous Coward."
I'm part British, so I do see the humour in it (along with the humour in pulling someone's pants down in public, placing a live mouse in a freshly-prepared meat pie, kicking someone who has just fallen into the horse trough, and other displays of hilarity taken straight out of the 15th century. However... I wish to point out that at no time during the process of submitting my previous comment was I invited to create an account on your site. So which of us does that show as being cowardly?
Regardless, thank you for the site. I occasionally find mentions of articles here that I find worthy of reading. And, after I click on the link to go to the page on the site where the article actually is, I often do read the article. And leave comments where both the author(s) and the people the article is directed to are likely to have a chance of seeing them.
Have a nice day.
Astro-turf. Pop culture feel good quotes, coming to a theater near you, and and mindless platitudes. The Harry Potter star-maker machinery is at work again, I see.
'bloomers' for the win. Ben Franklin would have loved that, the ol' whore monger.
Seeing what statistically significant humans think is highlight-worthy is incredibly depressing. Is it any wonder the One Percent can manage to stay in control? Humans have opposable thumbs and can manage language, but wise they aren't. They can't discern platitudes and doublespeak from actual wisdom.
From my own highlight list:
How much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life.
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of the Seven Gables (1851)
One can find the origin of these rather shallow "deep thoughts" in much older literature. The requirement is just a little knowledge. E.g. the first on the "recent list" is a seriously dumbed-down Faust:
When I say to the Moment flying;
'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!'
And so on.
When it was Battle Royale it was garbage, but some white lady "writes it",and its a literary masterpiece.], with a multi-million dollar movie & advertising campaign.
wtf?
Amazon knows what I highlight in my eBooks?! Scary......
I highlight to come back to a passage. I don't choose the most poignant prose to highlight, but the most descriptive for where I am in the book. It seems like a lot of the highlighting that is going on is just piling on -- people highlight passages because other people do.
The highlighted text:
The New Oxford American Dictionary Contents About this book
Truly inspiring
Does anyone else find this list to be a bit sparse. There's only a handful of books represented, which makes me wonder how many people are actually using this feature. Most people aren't even familiar with "The Picture of Dorian Gray," yet it has a half dozen quotes selected from it.
Crap. I wasn't logged in. My comment. Great book for those interested. Kind of like The Running Man, but in many ways, much crueler.
And a complete rip-off of Battle Royale. Skip it and just watch that instead.
And all of the above got the idea from Robert Scheckley's 1958 short story "The Prize of Peril", which is not only the first depiction of this type of game, but also of any form of reality television in fiction, decades before it materialized in the real world. I have not read the hunger games, but I wonder how much all of these add to the original concept...
That read the first book and thought "Really?? This is what all the excitement is about?" I didn't care for Hunger Games at all. It was an engaging read admittedly. I kept turning the pages. But the foreshadowing of where things were headed seemed pretty shallow to me (no, I did not cheat and peek at the ending). My closing thoughts were "well, someone's hoping to cash in on a screenplay here" and a sort of dirty feeling. I felt like one feels when you slow down at the sight of a roadside accident to see if there's anything gory.
I read the next two books just to see if it would get any good.
I have this vague sense of irony about the whole thing. As I listen to people tell me why they just like this book so much, some times I feel like a big part of the reason they liked it was because everyone else seems to as well. It's cool, because if you're read it, you're in the club. And the club says it's good. Given that a major theme of the book is humanity's ability as a collective to ignore stuff that is wrong, this seems hugely ironic to me.
If you enjoyed it, no offense meant. I respect that. To each his own. I liked the Mistborn series and Terry Pratchett novels far better than this among recent reads, and maybe you don't care for those.
Am I the only person that didn't care for Hunger Games at all?
One man's pink plane is another man's blue plane.
It is a rather chilling tale of conformity gone mad!
Agree with the sentiment and tone of GP, disagree with parent.
If there was any doubt that The Hunger Games are young adult novels, just read through the list.
I'd weep for the youth of today but I was a youth of yesterday and I was a giant idiot too. I mostly grew out of it. They will too. It's how it works.
I wondered, while reading the series, why there were so many damned highlights in it.
Seeing what statistically significant humans think is highlight-worthy is incredibly depressing. Is it any wonder the One Percent can manage to stay in control? Humans have opposable thumbs and can manage language, but wise they aren't. They can't discern platitudes and doublespeak from actual wisdom.
I like to highlight completely inane random passages taken out of context on my kindle
I expected some kind of great quips, something similar to all the great Heinlein quotes that come out of his books. Although I don't like his writing style, dialogues and ideas particularly, his quotes are great. But those ?!? it can't get any lamer than this I guess: "I just want to spend every possible minute of the rest of my life with you". Or this "I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever". "At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead". Come on !
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I really wouldn't expect the things that happen to be equipped to deal with people.
sic transit gloria mundi
Not really sure that you need to resort to conspiracy theories - the book is crazy popular right now; and yes, partly because of the massive advertising push for the movie (then again, it's getting a movie because it's crazy popular).
If they did this 3 years ago, it'd be full of Twilight nonsense.
sic transit gloria mundi
If you view this as true, wouldn't you want to meet and talk to the fucking genius brilliant marketer who thought up this strategy and then implemented it?
This article came at a fitting time as I had recently picked up the bad habit of writing. It's a peculiar problem I have; it sneaks up from time to time, usually as the result of a new gadget which had the misfortune of including a keyboard. The impulse afflicts me for a few days or weeks until I finally convince myself, in no uncertain terms, that I am really a irredeemably terrible writer and should, in a just universe, have long ago been issued a restraining order against the whole of the English language. As this is, alas, an entirely unjust universe, over the years I have left a terrifying path of half-finished video game plots, reimagined TV shows and fan-fics in my wake.
But I digress. When I stumbled upon this article I thought that it would be my rescue, as my recent purchase of a Bluetooth keyboard for my smartphone had me again fancying myself an auteur while the tiny rational part of by brain helplessly fought the controls. While I had never read any of Suzanne Collins work, surely anyone capable of penning a third of Amazon's top quotes must have a rapier wit and a stunning insight into the human condition. It would be a delightful chance to reaffirm my own incompetence and move on with my life. And I'd even get a new collection of bon mots to use at the water cooler. What could possibly go wrong?
Oops, I'm starting to digress again and souls don't crush themselves, after all! Bring on the quotes!
Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.
Ah, well, that's...very true. Very applicable to lots of...things.
It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart.
That's true, too! I've heard the same message plenty of times before, but that doesn't make it less insightful.
“I wish I could freeze this moment, right here, right now, and live in it forever,” he says.
Okay, maybe a bit trite, but still a nice sentiment.
“I just want to spend every possible minute of the rest of my life with you,” Peeta replies.
Ah...um, okay, now my secret My Little Pony fan-fic is starting to look good. Uh...moving on...
We’re fickle, stupid beings with poor memories and a great gift for self-destruction.
...Dear...
“Having an eye for beauty isn’t the same thing as a weakness,” Peeta points out. “Except possibly when it comes to you.”
...God...
Life in District 12 isn’t really so different from life in the arena. At some point, you have to stop running and turn around and face whoever wants you dead.
...this...
The berries. I realize the answer to who I am lies in that handful of poisonous fruit. If I held them out to save Peeta because I knew I would be shunned if I came back without him, then I am despicable. If I held them out because I loved him, I am still self-centered, although forgivable. But if I held them out to defy the Capitol, I am someone of worth. The trouble is, I don’t know exactly what was going on inside me at that moment.
...is...
I am not pretty. I am not beautiful. I am as radiant as the sun.
...all...
“District Twelve. Where you can starve to death in safety,”
...complete...
That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
is that some kind of native american name?
While the discussion is revolving round the books themselves, it's of more interest to ask 'why these books'.
Might I suggest that the greater percentage of e-reader users are technophiles to some extent, thus probably biased to Science Fiction.
What are all the technophobes using for reading devices. Surely not the, soon to be extinct (we're told) books.....
How many of these people knew that their highlighting history was being uploaded to Amazon? creepy if you ask me.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Of course there will always be a top 1%. The question is whether that 1% is achievable by the other 99% through hard work and education. At this time, it isn't. You can't end up with $20M in your IRA like Mitt Romney through hard work and education - you only get it by positioning, connection, loopholes in the tax code, and pushing "structured bankruptcies".
..."The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" isn't in the Kindel store.
“Being intelligent is not a felony, but most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor.” - L. Long
LOL I bet if it wasn't required reading it would have been Philip K Dick.
If google did something like this, there would be dozens of posters here going absolutely ballistic.
Collins has obviously gamed the system in some way. I have looked through the "highlighted" passages, and they are not so memorable that they would be highlighted as often as claimed. I don't know how she did it (software maybe?), but her books have more highlights than longstanding works that have much more thought-provoking and memorable content. It is somehow a scam.
That was simple sarcasm, not a conspiracy theory.
Millions of 12 year olds can't be wrong!
Does anyone else think that these are ridiculous statistics? The kindle underlines passages that are already highlighted, which has the potential to make it a lot more likely that someone else will highlight the same passage. In any case, if amazon thinks this is an accurate measure of what passages people are interested in, I think they need to go back and learn a little bit about conducting studies. More likely, they think it is a gimmick that lets people feel like they are interacting with other readers, and value it as such.
It's pretty interesting to go through the top-100 list and look at the passages people think are worth highlighting.
Why does Amazon think it is OK to look over my shoulder as I read a book, and then publish the results of what it sees?
Huh. I would have expected "eskimo" to be the number one highlighted word.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Talk about the dumbing down of American literacy.
Are these numbers normalized by number of readers or books bought? If not, it's just a "Most Popular Book" contest. You can't highlight what you don't own and haven't read.
Her house brooded behind partially trimmed hedges, an island of shadow under willow trees. Ryan Davenport, 18, shuddered as the sun passed behind a cloud. Sophia was in there. His Adams' apple bobbed as he swallowed, unease shadowing his handsome face.
His mind was made up. It was time to meet the parents.
The drone of unseen hedge trimmers somewhere nearby dulled his roiling mind. "Keep it together, R-dawg. Keep it together." Breathing slowly wasn't working. His pounding heart moved oxygen-deprived blood through even the most engorged of organs. Images of Sophia's svelte form flickered in his minds' eye, and he gasped for breath. Soon.
One step, then another. Through the hedge gate, into the shadow of the trees. He seemed to float towards the door. He was going to do it. As Ryan reached for the bell, a deeper shadow fell. The hedge trimmer had fallen silent.
He tried to turn, but it was too late.
At the scream of suddenly-right-behind-him electric trimmer, Ryan froze. His vision blurred and his head was whipped back and forth in a motion that reminded him of the paint-can shaker at the hardware store. There was a curious ripping sound. Tatters of bloody ear whacked warm, sticky tracers across his face, again and again.
"I told you never to come back here, you horny bastard." said the shadow, raising the now-dripping trimmer. Ryan staggered away. Sophie's naked form receded from his mind. He couldn't speak. The world outside the hedge gleamed in late afternoon sunlight, beckoning, beckoning. Unattainable.
A blow fell, and Ryan fell with it.
Amazon reviews are so thoroughly gamed it wouldn't surprise me one bit to learn there's a campaign/reward system in place for highlighting passages in ebooks that Amazon is more than happy to ignore. Some of their "top reviewers" sell search optimization services and are brazen enough to advertise them in their Amazon profiles.
To some extent, this kind of bias may also be an actual self-fulfilling prophecy, exactly like a pessimistic financial prediction would be in the mouth of a country's minister of finances, but in another, more intellectual (??) domain ;-)
Herve S.
eBooks and eBook readers weren't nearly as prevalent 3 years ago as they are now.
A big part of the success of such books is that most of the people that read them only read fashionable books. They've not read anything that's genuinely good, so they can't tell how bad they are. Since they don't know any better and have enjoyed the plot, they'll rave about the book, which perpetuates the myth that it's a "good" book. It's highly unlikely that they will expand their reading to any decent authors; at best they will read other books by the same author, keeping them away from genuinely good reading material.
This is one of the most insightful sentiments expressed in this thread...