One promise of networked books

Amazon has made available their most Most Highlighted Passages of All Time, from Kindle books. Not to spoil anything, but it’s hilarious that a passage from Gladwell’s Outliers is in the top ranked spot.

They’ve also got the most frequently highlighted books posted.

This is a great way to see what has stuck chords with readers, and perhaps (as Shipman, Marshall, Price, & Golivchinskly investigated) to identify the best bits in a book. Craig Mod had some interesting ideas and visualizations about “overlay” in ebooks recently. But these announcements from Amazon also bring up some of the creepier points (for librarians anyway) of tracking usage statistics in ebooks.

Along with highlighting, Kindles allow for notes to be attached to books– one wonders if those will be mined for content. I’ll have to check the EULA to see who owns those notes.

If it’s Amazon: what a business model!  Fledgling authors could buy this information from Amazon to learn how to write a book that people are interested in.

The good news is that the notes feature (and the highlighting feature, for that matter) are so unusable on the Kindle, I’m assuming only a small percentage of users even engage in these practices. I could be wrong. Maybe what this data really tells us is that people who read Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell are also more willing to put up with poor interface design.