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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.
How else did you think they let you see passages that other people have highlighted?
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 stored on their cloud you dumb shit, of course their collecting it.
Home -> Settings -> Popular Highlights -> Turn Off
Are you trolling?
If you have a Kindle, it's dead obvious they do this.
As soon as I started reading on my Kindle, I noticed underlines on things. Amazon shows you the most popular things to highlight in the books you read, and tells you that. It's one of the features of the Kindle (I turned it off, as I found it distracting).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Interestingly, the Hunger Games series is one of the few on Amazon that is significantly cheaper on the Kindle (and apps) then the paper version. And for some bizarre reason, they're the only Kindle books that I've seen that aren't plastered with typos.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's much better to see kids die horrible deaths than to hear the F word a few times. (see the controversy over the R rating for "Bully")
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Which was a rip-off of some Star Trek episode or Asimov story.
No new ideas in the hopper.
Don't bother (or do, if you must). These books exploit the stupidity, the covardice of the masses revelling in violence because they are afraid of a society without it. Throw some 'wisdom' into it to give the text a resemblance of an intellectual edge and 95% of the rest can be violence, latent or explicit, which is what they understand, what they think they can manage. These poor excuses for a human being are the same who love the crap of Ayn Rand, or think The art of war or The prince are the pinnacles of human wisdom. Kierkegaard noted that men die for freedom of speech but happily forgo freedom of thought. Let them suffer if they cannot stand social pressure. I think everyone can agree on the effect time has on this garbage: not quite the same as it has on Aristotle, Democrit, Schopenhauer or -to name a contemporary- Einstein. But let the poor souls have their armchair violence, anything to appease the mildly horrifying feeling of having to be alive.
69% earned it according to a study. 6% completely inherited it, and the remainder was a mixture. That's not exactly "only a couple of wealthy families."
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/most-affluent-americans-earn-their-wealth-feel-more-secure-during-economic-downturns-pnc-survey-reveals-57351597.html