The Popular Highlights feature shows the passages most highlighted by the book’s readers, an uncanny reminder that an experience which feels private – sitting down to read a book – puts you in contact with thousands of other readers worldwide. I was surprised when I first used my Kindle to see that certain sentences in the book I was reading were already underlined. But when the ebook and audiobook market is dominated by Amazon, a data-mining monolith, what does that mean for how and what we read? Does digitising books offer greater freedom for the consumer or are we sleepwalking into a world of data-driven literature where diversity disappears? Theoretically, these subscription services offer readers a greater diversity of writing. A model like Kindle Unlimited is appealing: you can access over a million titles for the cost of one book a month, without ever leaving your home. It’s already started to happen: lockdown saw a dramatic increase in digital and physical book subscriptions, whilst ebook and audiobook sales reached an all-time high. By the end of the 2020s, Forbes predicts, subscription ebook services will be as common as Spotify and Netflix.
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