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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.
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.
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!
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.
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...
Speaking of dumb shit: it's `they're,' not `their'
Violence is OK. They just have to keep sex out of it.
'The Gun is good. The penis is evil'
(Anybody remember Zardoz? You do? I'm very sorry.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
The Kindle Reader app does not make the ability to disable this visible or obvious.
It's also not visible or obvious on all versions of the Kindle.
I think you need to go take a better look at the software on the different Kindle models.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Uh, since you apparently found the Constitution to be TL:DR, allow me to point out something: the Constitution limits the actions of the Federal Government. Amazon may be near-omnipresent, but they're NOT the Feds. The operative document is your Kindle User Agreement, which, no doubt, you clicked through because it, too, was TL:DR. Lesson is, read the agreement, for that which the Large Print giveth, the Small Print usually taketh away....
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.
As the relieved father of a young woman who has finally made it into her twenties, I am keen to read some books where awful stuff happens to teenagers.
Especially goths. Does anyone know if these books have awful stuff happening to goths? Oh, and horny teenage boys who are always hanging around. I could do with a book about awful stuff happening to horny teenage boys with adams apples and their parents' cars who are always hanging around trying to get daughters to go to parties at the homes of absent parents. That could be very entertaining. Dismemberment, maybe brutal beatings with baseball bats, like that. I may have to check out these books.
Hey, they're making a movie of this Hunger Games stuff, right?
You are welcome on my lawn.
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)
anyone? doubtful. most? also doubtful.
amazon tracking and collecting this sort of data is not any different than tivo and cable companies doing the same with dvr's (and not any less spooky), what programs are recorded and watched, when they're watched, what parts get replayed, skipped-over or paused on. and like tivo, amazon defaults to opt-in instead of opt-out (which is not exactly convenient to do with tivo.. and near or completely impossible with cable company boxes). tivo took a lot of heat after that most unfortunate of superbowl half-time performances -- amazon should here as well.
Oh, I survived it, but I think it permanently scarred me.
Sean Connery in a pink diaper with suspenders - one of those horrid images that pop into my consciousness at inappropriate moments.
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.
Don't worry, no one here is impressed with your intellect. You're free to read something purely for enjoyment.
Bah. That's clearly just repackaged from:
"Hello, my friend! Stay awhile and listen..."
What an asshole you are. You make up your own cultural norms by presumably abstracting from your personal experiences and then you passionately insult anyone who doesn't follow the limited views that result.
Norm 1: people read books to be "enriched" by them as efficiently as possible ("Why go through all the trouble reading the Harry Potter or Hunger Games series when you could read Dr. Seuss's books and become three times as enriched in a fraction of the time?"). This is patently ridiculous. Books can be enriching, but they can also be guilty pleasures, pure entertainment, sleep-inducing material, or a host of other things. Moreover, books are different things to different people. Your own view of a book will probably not be very universal, and that's not a bad thing.
Norm 2: an "adult or literate high-school upperclassman" should not promote a children's or young adult's ("Dick and Jane") series. Screw you; I'll recommend The Hobbit or Harry Potter or whatever I think is appropriate for whatever reason I feel like to whomever I wish. You're in no position to pre-judge the quality of my reasons in such a hypothetical case you judgmental prick. You're similarly in no position to judge the value of everyone's reasons for reading a particular book.
You do have some good points--calling Twilight "good literature" is pretty silly using the usual definition of "literature"; most people on /. are literate adults; and Dr. Seuss' books are remarkably enriching, especially to the young. Your good points are buried in crap and shrouded in assholery today, though.
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.
i've read battle royale 2 or 3 times and seen the film, and the hunger game trilogy. they have a number of striking similarities in events, situations, and themes, (of which i won't get into due to spoiler concerns) but are stylistically quite different. hunger games is more informed by celebrity culture and reality tv, and written for a young teen audience, battle royale is japanese pulp written for adults and gets more cerebral among a wider variety characters. hunger games is larger in scope then battle royale. running man, truman show, lord of the flies all sorta come from this tradition too, and share themes and situations as well. i enjoyed them both, found they were written competently and had fun, i wouldn't mistake either for high literature though
nobody's perfect
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?
How do you know if someone has read Schopenhauer? Don't worry, they'll tell you.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass