No one owns a Kindle for very long without becoming obsessed by its social highlighting feature: unless you go into the preferences to turn it off, the glibbest and most epigrammatic sentences in any popular book begin to appear with dotted lines underneath them and the words ’19 [or however many] people highlighted this’. Our own Mark Mason has written brilliantly and sympathetically about the consequences. But it is now necessary to admit that he may have missed a trick.
It turns out you may be able to use Kindle highlights to make a rough estimate of how many people are actually reading a book, as opposed to just buying it. The technique was described by Jordan Ellenburg in the Wall Street Journal; I saw it on the reliably interesting academic blog Crooked Timber. He calls it the Hawking Index, after that great unread classic A Brief History of Time:
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