Don ’t read this: What Kindle’s most-highlighted passages tell us about popular taste

[Dennis Baron]

There's a new post on the Web of Language:

Don’t read this: What Kindle’s most-highlighted passages tell us about  
popular taste

The New York Times reports that the Amazon Kindle is turning reading  
from an isolating activity into a social one.

Here’s how: Kindle users are annotating what they read. Amazon then  
collects these annotations and reprints “the passages that are most  
highlighted by the millions of Kindle customers” on its “Popular  
Highlights” website.

Those who fear that computers are putting an end to “real” reading can  
relax. For the born-digital generation, it’s just a hop, skip, and  
click from Facebook to “The Brothers Karamazov.”

But don't start the party just yet, at least not till you read the  
whole post on the Web of Language:

http://bit.ly/weblan


____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

read the Web of Language:
http://www.illinois.edu/goto/weboflanguage

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