Even if we can capture patterns and overcome sharing, we might come back to consider the commonplace book.

The highlights you made in FreeTime are preserved in My Clippings.txt, but you can’t see them on the Kindle unless you are in FreeTime mode. Progress between FreeTime and regular mode are tracked separately, too. I now pretty much only use my Kindle in FreeTime mode so that my reading statistics are tracked. If you are a data nerd and want to crunch the data on your own, it is stored in a SQLite file on your device under system > freetime > freetime.db.

“We’ve been thoughtful,” Amazon continued, “about adding only features and experiences that preserve and enhance the reading experience.” The question of whose experience doesn’t seem to come up.

Ebooks don’t have those limitations, both because of how readily new editions can be created and how simple it is to push “updates” to existing editions after the fact. Consider the experience of Philip Howard, who sat down to read a printed edition of War and Peace in 2010. Halfway through reading the brick-size tome, he purchased a 99-cent electronic edition for his Nook e-reader:As I was reading, I came across this sentence: “It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern …” Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading. Some pages later I encountered the rogue word again. With my third encounter I decided to retrieve my hard cover book and find the original (well, the translated) text. For the sentence above I discovered this genuine translation: “It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern …”A search of this Nook version of the book confirmed it: Every instance of the word kindle had been replaced by nook, in perhaps an attempt to alter a previously made Kindle version of the book for Nook use. Here are some screenshots I took at the time:It is only a matter of time before the retroactive malleability of these forms of publishing becomes a new area of pressure and regulation for content censorship. If a book contains a passage that someone believes to be defamatory, the aggrieved person can sue over it—and receive monetary damages if they’re right. Rarely is the book’s existence itself called into question, if only because of the difficulty of putting the cat back into the bag after publishing.

Last month, Amazon announced what could be a landmark in electronic marginalia: public note sharing for the Kindle

To have, but maybe not to read. Like Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time,” “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” seems to have been an “event” book that many buyers didn’t stick with; an analysis of Kindle highlights suggested that the typical reader got through only around 26 of its 700 pages. Still, Piketty was undaunted.

It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.

I’m absolutely positioning the Kindle to be a replacement habit for Facebook and Twitter. How much smarter would you be if you replaced half of your social media usage with reading?

There are “literally zero hoops,” one user in 4chan’s /pol/ forum told another in 2015. “Just sign up for Kindle Direct Publishing and publish away. It’s shocking how simple it is, actually.” Even Breivik, at the start of the 1,500-page manifesto that accompanied his terrorist attacks, suggested that his followers use KDP’s paperback service, among others, to publicize his message.

Amazon introduced the all-new Kindle Oasis

On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

Amazon Cloud Reader unfortunately does not support the collections feature, so you will be unable to view the collections you create through the Kindle app or in your Amazon account.

possible with modern technology,