So help me…we’re about to see the end of my year-long love affair with Kindle.
They’ve started doing this thing (or at least I’ve only recently become aware) where they show you the highlighted passages in the book you’re currently reading. That is, they show you, by way of light grey dots, the parts in your book that OTHER readers have highlighted. If you press the “enter” button, you can see exactly how many of those other readers marked the passage for posterity.
It was fine back in college when I bought used textbooks. Then when you saw someone else’s highlighting you felt it was a kiss of luck from those who came before. Pay particular attention to this, the yellow glow would gently whisper.
But now? It seems to be an intrusion on the relationship I’m having with the story. I don’t need to know that 131 people really liked the way Asimov expressed that thought or that 56 people liked the description of grief that crept up in my latest romance read.
So I’m doing what I do best. I’m being snarkily subversive. Thus everyone who reads a book after me will see that one idiot highlighted every instance of the word “penis” in The Crossroads Cafe and they will also see that another (the same) has highlighted STOP…READ…ING…MY…HIGH…LIGHTS in a couple of other popular Science Fiction works. If they happen to read a certain philosophical tome they will find that a mysterious person has highlighted LETS…MAKE…BA..BI..E..S…
It’s juvenile. It’s ludicrous. I know this. But there is a part of me who feels like I need to push back. If technology has to gather all of our thoughts into one vast hive mind, surely some of those thoughts should be a little obnoxious, a little funny, a little subversive.
Just Another Pretty Farce 
I don’t have a kindle. Isn’t there someway to disable that “feature”? It sounds utterly obnoxious!
I’ve been considering getting a reader and am just starting to comparison shop. If one is not able to disable this feature, Kindle instantly moves to the bottom of my list!
I did a similar thing with a novel I read for an English class: hated it, so spent the whole time reading writing snarky comments in the margins, then sold it back to the bookstore in the hope that someone else would get a kick out of it.
Hilarious. Sounds just like something I would do.
Oh dear… A great way to push back, but I have to say the highlight would absolutely and completely irritate me. I didn’t even like to buy used books in college that were to blessed with yellow (luckily they always seem to lose interest after chapter 3 and the yellow fades to minimal coverage). It is my reading philosophy that I would get what I get out of a book, not what someone else got out of it (after all if I wanted to know what someone else got from a book, I would have bought the cliff notes rather than the book). It is a strange and egocentric mindset that I sometimes get into that says… If I want your opinion I’ll ask for it. Don’t mind someone sharing their opinion at book club, but highlighted books is the equivalent of my dad reading the paper to us all over breakfast. (An annoying habit in an otherwise perfect father.)
On the other hand, I am hypocritical – because, though I don’t like someone highlighting in books I may read… unless it is fiction, all my books have passages underlined and pages dog eared.