Kindle ‘Popular Highlights’ may become popular with college students

The lazy college student finds ways to do less reading.

In the near future, it may be unnecessary to rely on used textbooks for another student’s highlights.  Instead, the “time-challenged” scholar will be able to use Kindle’s Popular Highlights feature to see what many other students considered the important passages in the textbook.

Q: What are Popular Highlights?
The Amazon Kindle and the Kindle Apps provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them. We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting 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.

I’ve been noticing Popular Highlights in a book I’m reading for a continuing education course.  Although they are not particularly germane to the course I’m taking, as the highlights come up I can see how they could be very helpful in cases where hundreds of students are using the same book for the same course.

New Year’s resolution – a book a month?

I’m thinking about reading some of these as a new year’s resolution, maybe tackling one book each month.

20 Classic Novels You Can Read in One Sitting

Some of these books I can either get free or for less than a dollar on my Kindle.  Although most of them are under 200 pages, in the comments it was noted that a few of these are really not two-hour reads (Wuthering Heights?).  As a slow reader, I should take that into account.

Here’s the list.

1. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain
3. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll
4. Animal Farm, by George Orwell
5. Around the World in Eighty Days, by Jules Verne
6. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
7. Candide, by Voltaire
8. Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
9. The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
10. Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton
11. Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
12. Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
13. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
15. Night, by Elie Wiesel
16. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
17. The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane
18. The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
19. The Stranger, by Albert Camus
20. Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

Some more ideas are in the comments, including one of my favorites, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway.  It would be interesting to re-read some books that I remember fondly from my youth and see if they’ve stood the test of time.

Two (or three) hours a month – how hard can that be?  I can think of it as my own personal battle against the end of deep and focused reading.

Kindle Fire – the end of deep and focused reading?

After using it for about a month, I have found it is sometimes challenging to focus when reading a book on my Kindle Fire.  When I’m out and about I can often find free WiFi, which means I can access the Internet.  So I can relate to Alexandra Petri’s lament about her Kindle Fire.

Look, if you put the Internet on the device I am supposed to be using to read, I will never read again.

Can you blame me? I am only human.

I can’t focus. If all these studies about multitasking have taught us anything, it is that we all think we can multitask but no one actually can. In the course of writing this I have eight times run off and reloaded the page to see if anything had happened on YouTube that I should know about.

The end of reading books?

It’s not that people will stop reading. We do vast amounts of reading online every day — the equivalent of a good Hemingway novel. But it’s not deep but broad, not focused but fast.

Students need deep and focused reading skills to learn, so this possible trend is worrisome.

Related:
E-reader ownership doubles in last six months
Save money on college textbooks by using Kindle 

E-reader ownership doubles in last six months

That sounds about right.  ”All” my friends and relatives either own e-readers or are talking about which one to buy.

The share of adults in the United States who own an e-book reader doubled to 12% in May, 2011  from 6% in November 2010.  E-readers, such as a Kindle or Nook, are portable devices designed to allow readers to download and read books and periodicals.  This is the first time since the Pew Internet Project began measuring e-reader use in April 2009 that ownership of this device has reached double digits among U.S. adults.

Around Christmas time, it seemed as if all “everyone” was getting an iPad, but apparently growth in tablet computer ownership has slowed down.

Tablet computers—portable devices similar to e-readers but designed for more interactive web functions—have not seen the same level of growth in recent months.  In May 2011, 8% of adults report owning a tablet computer such as an iPad, Samsung Galaxy or Motorola Xoom.  This is roughly the same percentage of adults who reported owning this kind of device in January 2011 (7%), and represents just a 3 percentage-point increase in ownership since November 2010.  Prior to that, tablet ownership had been climbing relatively quickly.

I own neither an e-reader nor a tablet computer; I’m still in the “talking about” stage.

Source:  Pew Internet