I was under the weather yesterday. So much so that I even stayed home from work and slept until about the middle of the afternoon. I then felt well enough to read a bit and since I was close to being done with My Brilliant Career, I retrieved my Kindle from my work bag and finished it. Wonderful! But more on that in a later post. This morning I went to work and began reading Dava Sobel’s A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos.

An observation. Kindle has the option to view the highlights other readers have made within the book on my Kindle while I am reading. I have this feature turned on because I find it fascinating to see what other people thought interesting and worth noting while they read. About the time I was reading Bleak House on my Kindle last summer I began to notice that people tend to highlight the same passages. Was this just because the passages were recognized as important by multiple readers? Or was there something else going on?

I’ve kept my observing eye open over the months, and it just seemed more and more bizarre that I would run across passages that indicated “highlighted by four Kindle users” or five or six but never just “one.” So I began to wonder, do people reading on their Kindle with the view other reader’s highlights turned on tend to underline a passage because someone else has already done so? Does a reader think, a couple other people thought this passage was important so I should underline it too?

I decided no, it was just coincidence. Until today. As I was reading a A More Perfect Heaven this morning I again noticed that the same passages were highlighted by multiple people. I dismissed it as coincidence until I reached this passage:

equant—in effect a second axis of rotation, off-center from the true axis.

This half, out of context, nonsensical incomplete sentence was highlighted by six Kindle users. Six! Since I read this today I know the context, but by next week or by the time I finish the book, if I saw that in my highlights I would have no idea what it was talking about. Why would six people highlight this?

The only thing I can think of to explain it is that one person highlighted it and then the next person thought they should highlight it too and then because two people highlighted it the third person thought it should be highlighted, and so on until it has accumulated six highlights. For the record, I did not highlight it.

No longer am I able to excuse as coincidence the tendency for the same passages to be highlighted by so many people. I find this sheep-like behavior in highlighting to be a bit disturbing. I would expect some overlap between readers but nothing this consistent. Does it stem from lazy reading? Or maybe a certain lack of reading confidence? Or perhaps people are afraid of looking stupid by highlighting the “wrong” passages so highlight the same ones others before them have?

When I read on my Kindle I highlight a lot, much more than I would if I were reading a print book. I do this because I can’t page back through my Kindle when I am done looking for a passage that was on the left hand side of the page near the bottom about a quarter of the way through the book somewhere in chapter four or five. So if there is a fact or interesting tidbit I think I might want to know for later when I am blogging about the book I highlight it. As a result, the number of highlights for A More Perfect Heaven has already grown since I began reading it and a good many of my highlights have not been highlighted by others. I plan to keep an eye on the highlights for this book to see if people who read it after me begin highlighting any of my highlights. I’ll let you know if there are any interesting observations to be made.