Sideswipe: April 27: School holiday madness? Caught short? Bad parker? All three?
26 Apr, 2021 05:00 PM
2 minutes to read
The Hawking Index In 2014, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg examined the distribution of highlighted passages within Amazon Kindle books as an unscientific measure of how far the average reader gets through each book before throwing in the towel. If the "popular highlights" are clustered densely near the start of a book, that's (arguably) a sign that many readers abandon the book before reading much farther.
Hard Choices, by Hillary Clinton, 1.9%
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, 2.4%
Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace, 6.4%
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking, 6.6%