Amazon Kindle Popular Highlights

Regularly updated content is a key component to maximizing an agency’s Internet presence. But, a common question I get from agents is, “Where do I find content that I can use to post on my website, Facebook page, LinkedIn status, or email newsletter articles?” 

Using quotes from popular books is a great source of material. Amazon is a little known source for great quotes from many of the most popular books, selected by the individuals reading the book. This is crowdsourcing (tapping into the collective intelligence of the public at large to complete tasks that a company would normally perform itself) at its best. 

All Amazon Kindle customers have the ability to highlight passages they want to remember, just like using a yellow highlighter with a traditional book. What’s different with the Kindle is these highlights are stored at Amazon, aggregated, and made available to anyone. 

Amazon displays “Popular Highlights” by combining the individual highlights of all Kindle customers reading a particular Kindle book and displaying the passages with the most highlights for that book on that book’s Amazon Kindle page. 

The advantage to using these Popular Highlights is that it allows you to use quotes from the book that were the most meaningful to the greatest number of people. Only the best quotes are displayed, or at least what the most people thought was the best quote. And not all Kindle books have Popular Highlights. 

On a Kindle, Popular Highlights are marked with a gray dashed underline. The number of people who have highlighted the text appears at the beginning of the marked text. 

You can see Popular Highlights for all Kindle books that have them by going to Amazon.com and searching for a particular book in the Kindle store. If there are “Popular Highlights” for the book they will generally be listed towards the bottom, after the Reader Review section. 

For the most popular highlights on Amazon.com check out:
https://kindle.amazon.com/most_popular 

We have begun using this tool to post short quotes from various business books on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. 

Try it out and let me know how it works for you.