It was a little jarring to be reading a popular book on the iPad the other day and seeing a passage highlighted. There was no indication why the passage was highlighted, nor did a click on it lead anywhere. After a little research, it was clear Amazon's Popular Highlights was the culprit -- and the retailing giant's intrusion in our eBook-reading experience was a little jarring, to say the least, as well as an awkward attempt at social networking.
A few months ago Amazon rolled out a Kindle-specific website and added Popular Highlights to the mix. When you highlight text for future reference on your Kindle, that information is transferred back to Amazon servers and aggregated into a database of highlights. The Kindle website lists the most popular highlights (a Malcolm Gladwell quote from Outliers currently leads the list), while highlights are included any book you buy from Amazon.
Social networking is still in a nascent form in the eBook world. Copia created a stir at the beginning of the year when it introduced an eReader with social-networking capabilities: while the original release of April has slipped lately, the firm is still accepting users into a beta program.
With Copia, you'll be explicitly buying an eBook reader where social networking is built in, One of the more troubling aspects to the Kindle feature is Amazon rolling it out without actually informing us. Now, it's one thing to be asked to voluntarily participate in a larger database designed to promote books, especially one that's actually useful: people contribute book reviews to the Amazon site all the time. It's another to cull market research unknowingly from readers and then aggregate the results. On the iPad version of the Kindle software the default under Settings is to enable the collection by default.
The bright side to all this: it doesn't appear that Popular Highlights are actually tallied when a book is being read on a non-Kindle device; i.e., for instance, when using Kindle software on an iPad or PC.
Social networking in the eBook world is a natural; we're eagerly awaiting the Copia platform. For Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and, we assume, Kobo as well) to either bungle it or ignore it completely could be a misstep as the eReader platforms mature,
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