Marginalia and Community in the Age of the Kindle: Popular Highlights in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

In our digital age, as Lawrence Lessig has influentially noted, “text is one part—and increasingly, not the most powerful part—of constructing meaning” (39). Literature in general, and that which has entered into the public domain through copyright expiration in particular, is increasingly being accessed in digital form, including through e-book readers like Amazon’s bestseller, the Kindle. In these digital interfaces, more information than just text is on the screen, and this additional information can affect how the words are processed by readers. Among the Kindle’s many innovative—and automatic—features is what Amazon calls Popular Highlights, a feature by which an e-book underlines passages that have been highlighted by at least three distinct readers and displays the number—though not the identities—of readers who have highlighted them. Any reader can highlight any passage, but every reader will see the highlight unless they turn off this function. For Victorians, reading was often a social activity, with family, friends, and neighbours gathering to listen to the reading of a book; the Kindle is again enabling the possibility of widespread communal reading, though the individual reader of the e-book engages with an anonymous, quantified, and somewhat mysterious online community. What differences does this form of technological community make in the reading of Victorian literature?

This essay explores this and other questions raised by such digital marginalia through the case study of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, a free e-book that has been promoted by Amazon in a prominent press release. Using The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I examine the rhetoric of the e-reader interface and the social reading experience that is made an inherent part of engaging with the Kindle e-text. How does the collaboration behind the Popular Highlights feature affect readers’ experiences of the book? What kinds of reading might the Kindle’s popular highlighting enable or close off? How do such popular readings conflict with or complement scholarly readings of the same text? What might such popular readings have to offer to scholars’ understanding of Victorian literature in a digital age?

In order to tackle the above questions, I tracked the highlights in the Kindle’s Sherlock Holmes over a three-month period (June through August 2011) to chart the rise and fall in popularity of particular passages. Such quantitative data provides a concrete sense of how the Popular Highlights function affects a Victorian e-book over time. Thus, this essay is part reception study and part critical analysis of a massively popular interface that has not yet been studied by scholars—a new form of consumption of literature that merits further and deeper scholarly exploration than is possible in the scope of this essay. The Kindle offers a new method and new data for scholars interested in reader-response criticism and also opens up a number of pedagogical opportunities, through its Popular Highlights and Public Notes functions.

Amazon’s Kindle

Amazon’s Kindle is not the only mobile reading device on the market: Barnes & Noble’s Nook, Apple’s iPad (albeit more a multipurpose tablet than purely an e-book reader), Sony’s Reader, and the Kobo eReader also merit mention. But the Kindle has thus far outsold its competitors, including those e-readers that were on the market prior to its introduction in November 2007, such as Sony’s Reader. As of early 2011, the Kindle represented sixty-seven per cent of the American e-reader market, while the Nook had twenty-two per cent (Flamm). Amazon has been notoriously secretive about the number of Kindles sold, citing “the competitive nature of our business” in explaining its policy “not to give out information on the inner workings of our company” (Pathepuram). Instead, the company’s press and investor releases vaguely reference “millions of third-generation Kindle devices” sold in a particular quarter or compare sales of e-books to paperback and hardback books, showing ratios of 115:100 and 3:1, respectively.¹

In the press release announcing production of the first Kindles, the company...