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Orwellian ebooks may be revealing more than we realise
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Newspaper Article
Orwellian ebooks may be revealing more than we realise
2014
Overview
Awkward or not, [Kindle] users choose to annotate millions of book passages every year, according to Amazon's Popular Highlights website. Every time this happens the device informs the company, which then combines the highlights of all users to identify the most popular passages. For those of Orwellian persuasion, this is all a bit Minitrue, as is the newspeak blurb promoting the initiative: \"Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.\" The \"meaningful\" aspect of the highlights section is debatable. The top 25 most highlighted passages of all time make for depressing reading. Quotations from the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde and Jane Austen feature, but they are lost amid the 17 passages from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games trilogy that dominate the listing. Most of these are far from compelling, such as the number-one quote, from Catching Fire : \"Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them.\" The authenticity of the selections can also be questioned. Once a certain line is shown to be highlight worthy, it will likely attract other readers to follow suit. Are readers highlighting a quote because it appealed to them or because it appealed to others? Is this cacophony of ghost readers, as related by one commercial giant, telling us or helping us to see what's important in a book? There are concerns it is bringing us closer to [Winston Smith]'s views of reading in Kindle's 399th most highlighted book of all time: \"The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.\"
Publisher
The Irish Times Ltd
Subject
