Melville House Books

A GalleyCat item by Jason Boog points us to a beta page at Amazon that shows the most popular passages being highlighted by readers of Kindle editions.

As Amazon explains at the page, “The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights…. We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights.”

Why does Amazon do this? To “help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people.”

So what is the most popular passage highlighted by Kindle readers? It’s the following not-quite-a-full-sentence from Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers, which was highlighted by 1698 people so far: “… 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.”

The next eleven places on the list are for passages from either William P. Young‘s The Shack, or Dan Brown‘s The Lost Symbol. No other book enters the list until number 12, when Mitch Albom‘s bon mots from Have a Little Faith start getting highlighted.

So what do we learn from this? Well, that lightweight bestsellers are getting more closely read, perhaps, than you thought. And despite its refusal to release sales information, we now know that Amazon has sold at least 1698 Kindles.

And, oh yeah: Big Brother is watching you.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.