Modern day authors get plenty of feedback in the form of media reviews and customer scoring on Amazon, Goodreads and other sites. But as an author I can tell you there is nothing more gratifying than specific reader feedback. A few years ago, students at Arizona State gifted me a copy of The New Polymath with their markings from a class assignment (see photo below) Pink markings = surprised; Green = useful at work, orange = disagree and yellow = learned. And they had specific comments inside the book. It was truly a marvelous gift.
A similarly fascinating new source of feedback comes from a Amazon Kindle feature called Popular Highlights. That aggregates the highlights of all Kindle customers and reports the most highlighted passages in a book (and for a reader highlights them as you read your copy ). I periodically check The Kindle app on my iPad for the evolving set of highlights.
It’s not perfect, of course. Many readers still buy print copies and their Post-IT and yellow marker highlights cannot be captured. Some readers turn off annotations for privacy or other reasons so their input is absent.
As an author, though, it is granular and constantly evolving crowd feedback. And a humbling reminder that in our busy lives, many readers only read bits and pieces of books- not cover to cover :)
Gutenberg would be fascinated with the growing democratization of book publishing.
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