I’ve long said that newspapers and books will become digital when they have all the qualities of the existing media – including readability, portability, and the ability to highlight and make notes – as well as all of the capabilities of digital media – such as searchability, compactness, and remote access.
The Amazon Kindle allows people to highlight passages and take notes – a basic functionality required for a e-book. What this also allows is to discover what others are highlighting, providing a form of collaborative filtering. Amazon has just released a list of the most highlighted books and phrases on the Kindle.
The most highlighted books are:
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
The Shack by William P. Young
A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
A selection of the most highlighted phrases:
1. From Outliers:
three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying
2. From The Shack:
Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions. Most emotions are responses to perception—what you think is true about a given situation. If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too. So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms—what you believe. Just because you believe something firmly doesn’t make it true
4. From The Lost Symbol:
WHAT WE HAVE DONE FOR OURSELVES ALONE DIES WITH US; WHAT WE HAVE DONE FOR OTHERS AND THE WORLD REMAINS AND IS IMMORTAL.
12. From Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom:
“My friends, if we tend to the things that are important in life, if we are right with those we love and behave in line with our faith, our lives will not be cursed with the aching throb of unfulfilled business. Our words will always be sincere, our embraces will be tight. We will never wallow in the agony of ‘I could have, I should have.’ We can sleep in a storm.
15. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
“When you’re screwing up and nobody says anything to you anymore, that means they’ve given up on you.”
16. Born to Run by Christopher Mcdougall
“Beyond the very extreme of fatigue and distress, we may find amounts of ease and power we never dreamed ourselves to own; sources of strength never taxed at all because we never push through the obstruction.”
Once a lot more people start using ebooks and annotating them, we will have a whole new range of inputs to discovering what people find the most interesting and inspiring. We will be richer for it.
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