Name: The Hawking Index.
Age: Brand new!
Appearance: Percentagey.
So it's a percentage? Well I'd say it's really a ratio expressed as a percentage.
Tell me more! Essentially, it shows the average page number of the five most highlighted passages in a Kindle book as a proportion of that book's total length. If a 200-page book's average Kindle highlight appears on page 200, that gives it a Hawking Index (or HI) of 100%. If it's on page 100, 50%. Page 50, 25%. And so on.
I see. Now just remind me why that's interesting. Basically it is supposed to measure how far people get into a book before giving up. The index was flippantly proposed by Jordan Ellenberg, an American mathematician, in a blog for the Wall Street Journal. He named it after Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time.
Cool! So I can see which books everybody buys in order to show off, but then don't actually enjoy? Kind of.
Why only kind of? Oh just because it's statistically flawed. Print readers aren't counted, nor are Kindle-readers who don't use the highlighting feature. And maybe writers put more appealing sentences at the beginning.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if we ignore all that? If we ignore all that then this is fun! Catching Fire, the second Hunger Games novel, scores 43.4%, which is close to the 50% average you might expect from books that are read to the end. By comparison, the average highlight in Fifty Shades of Grey is only 25.9% of the way through it.
It's hard to imagine people buying Fifty Shades in order to show off. It is. But mostly the more prestigious books do have a really low HI – just 6.4% ifor David Foster Wallace's postmodern epic, Infinite Jest, for example. And prestigious non-fiction scores still worse. A Brief History of Time gets 6.6%, but Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century beats that with 2.4%. (The last of the popular highlights appears on page 26 out of 700.) And Hillary Clinton beats even Piketty. Her new book Hard Choices scores just 1.9%!
At what point do people stop reading Pass Notes? Oh, long ago. You can say anything you like now. No one notices.
YOU'RE ALL IDIOTS! Yeah, maybe don't say that.
Do say: "I found Piketty's later chapters especially compelling."
Don't say: "I can't believe Raskolnikov got away with it!"
