Kindles will kill off the bookish loner (thank God)

The Kindle has changed reading in so many ways. A library in your pocket rather than the hulk of a hardback. Uniform pixels where once dust motes rose from an ancient page. But the biggest change, the most fundamental one, is emotional rather than physical. Reading, which used to be the most private of activities, is now an increasingly public one.

The same internet that lets you download a book’s content also lets you upload your reaction to that content. As well as allowing you to mark passages in a book, Kindle’s highlighting feature shows you which passages other readers have marked. What’s more, Amazon ranks the results. Of the 25 most highlighted passages, all but six come from the Hunger Games trilogy. The popularity of the series is a useful reminder to adults who say ‘I wish children would read more’ when what they really mean is ‘I wish children would read more Dickens.’ Much as you might want to, you cannot programme a kid’s imagination. Nor should you try: if The Hunger Games is going to lead to David Copperfield, it’ll do so in its own good time.

But discounting the hit trilogy for a moment, it’s interesting to see which other passages are proving popular. At number two in the chart is the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice (‘It is a truth universally acknowledged …’). The same novel gives us, at number seven: ‘Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.’ Vanity, the cynic might suggest, explains some of the Kindle highlighting going on. Someone in Guatemala, for instance, has picked: ‘Remember that the event horizon is the path in space-time of light that is trying to escape from the black hole’ in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

But just as we’ve learned that the presence of that book on someone’s shelf doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve read it, so we can identify and ignore the literary poseurs in the digital world.