Popular Kindle Highlights

Kindle offers an opportunity I find intriguing. You can view the most popular highlights of readers. There is a concept in the highlighting and annotation literature I follow that is referred to as “expert notes/highlights”. This is not exactly the same, but might be considered as crowdsourcing highlighting. As a Kindle author, I pay attention to popular highlights in the books I write. I think it is interesting to see what is most important to those who read my books. 

You may or may not have this Kindle featured enabled. If you do, you will find popular highlights underlined and the highlights you add in the color you have designated. The underlined highlights are kind of difficult to see in this image, but that is by design. The developers did not want the popular highlights to be distracting.

I don’t think turning the public highlights feature on and off is intuitive, so I thought I would explain. I am using the Kindle app as the basis for my example.

This image shows the “library view” within the app and the important icon here is “MORE” located at the bottom of the screen.

“More” reveals multiple settings and you will need to access “OTHER”. Multiple step processes such as this do make things a little vague.

One of the “OTHER” settings allows popular highlights to be turned ON or OFF.

There is a second way to view popular highlights that is kind of interesting and may be more efficient depending how you might use these highlights.

If you get out of full screen mode to access the outline and some other tools associated with the book you are reading, you will find “Popular Highlights”.

This way of access popular highlights shows the list of most popular highlights associated with each chapter and how frequently each segment of text has been highlighted.

To the right of each text segment, you will see the three dot pattern (…) indicating more options. One of these options is “Go-To” and this is how you would then find the popular text segment within the context of the book.