Amazon has starting rolling out its latest 2.5 Kindle update and with it a new feature called Popular Highlights.

What some will either class as incredibly annoying or the future of reading, users will now be able to see where other people have highlighted text within a book, very much like reading a used text book.

While you are unable to see why people have highlighted a specific part of the page you will be able to see how popular that highlighted text is, possibly changing the way you read in the future.

"We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people", claims Amazon.

So far the book and passage that has the most highlights is popular quote book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell:

"...the more money they made the next day on the streets.Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us."

Highlighted by 1698 Kindle users at the time of writing, it's clear that the new feature, yet to be fully rolled out, is already proving popular amongst those with the new software update.

Other books getting the popular highlight love are The Shack by William P. Young and The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.

Thankfully you can turn it off. 

Image credit: msippey