Hacker News Books

Uh.. In order for them to save your highlights and transfer them between devices, it needs to be put into their servers somewhere.

Maybe it's a little creepy they admit to 'snooping' it, but then again they're being honest and open about it so I don't have any problem with it (I'm a Kindle owner). As long as they keep it anonymous though I have no problem, it's similar to the Netflix anonymous data isn't it?

They also store your notes, and while I'm hoping those aren't snooped we really don't have any guarantee over it just as we don't have any guarantee that someone at Google doesn't read our gmail account, or any number of other sites and scenarios.

The demoralizing part for me is that a lot of the top quoted passages are from The Shack and The Lost Symbol, and the very top one is from a Malcolm Gladwell book. In fact all of the top 12 are from those 3 books, and 9 of the top 25 are from The Shack (which I had never even heard of before, then again I rarely read fiction and certainly not religious-inspired fiction).

I wish we could have a more normalized view of this- instead of just showing us the most highlighted, have an algorithm that somehow takes into account overall downloads as well. This would give us a better idea of the 'important' passages and could really help out in finding new books to read. Especially so if you could filter by genre because frankly I wish we could cut out the fiction part altogether. I don't really see much point in highlighting passages of fiction unless it's some literary classic or you're doing it for school or whatever, but really what's the point in saving some random passages from some Dan Brown book? To each their own, though...