![]() It is also a means by which Amazon collects as data information about users’ reading practices and the highlights and notes they make. Amazon indicates how many other people highlighted a particular passage (anonymously) and publishes on its website a “popular highlights” section that reveals how many people highlighted which passages of which books and, if you permit Amazon to do so, makes your notes public. This is in part an attempt to mimic the material conditions of reading printed texts where readers can underline passages in books, make notes in the margin or attach sticky notes however it also invests the device with significant capabilities of social networking. Kindle Highlights allows a reader to select and mark passages of interest within an e-book and to create notes about a passage, chapter, or whole book. The Kindle’s dominance of the e-book market as a device and as a publishing platform has been widely noted and in an effort to continually value-add to the Kindle experience and to capitalise on the viral power of the social networking phenomenon, Amazon introduced a highlighting function to its e-book platform. However, certain contemporary market conditions have seen Amazon become a force that not only impacts the selling of books but now also the formats in which they are published, which ultimately shapes reading practices. For Rainie et al, the authors of a recent report on e-reading as a growing practice, “The rise of e-books … is part of a larger story about a shift from printed to digital material” (2012, p.1), which in turn is part of a history of technologies of publishing and reading that date back to antiquity.
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