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Embracing The Digital Book →
The reason I’ve always preferred to buying my own books rather than borrowing is because I’m the type of reader that has a penchant for excessive note-taking and highlighting as a form of referencing back on something significant.
On the Kindle, I highlight passages like crazy and I enjoy the ability to access them in 2 ways: By connecting the Kindle via USB and exporting every highlighted passage into a .txt format or online at AmazonKindle.
Oddly enough on Kindle for Mac, you can only view what you’ve highlighted but you can’t copy and paste.
With eBooks, you should be able to share more of what you read and while I’ve might not have given the idea much thought, I’m all for Craig Mod’s suggestion in how nimble text should be on the Kindle.
If I’m reading a particularly great passage in, say, On Writing Well, and wish to quote it to my Twitter followers, I should be able to do that seamlessly within Kindle.app. I select a highlight and choose “broadcast.”
Kindle.app will then cut the text and include a link in the tweet. The link will send my followers to the corresponding page in On Writing Well on amazon.com. They can browse the preceding and following pages for context, and then choose to buy. If they already own the book, they can read it, right there, in that web interface.
I would love to see this on a future software update.
