The story about Piketty’s tome was born of the fact that nothing was highlighted beyond page 26, giving a score of 2.6%. The higher the number, he assumed, the more that was read.Įllenberg found that the most read bestseller was Donna Tartts’ The Goldfinch, since all five of the top highlights were from the last 20 pages, giving a completion score of 98.5%. To arrive at the HI, the page numbers of a book’s top five highlights were averaged, and then divided by the number of pages in the book. If people didn’t get past the first chapter, the highlights would be clustered at the beginning. He assumed that the highlights of books read to the end would be scattered throughout the text. To work out the HI, Ellenberg used the “Popular Highlights” feature in Amazon’s Kindle reader, which lists the five most frequently highlighted passages in a book. The index was so-named after Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which has sold more than 10 million copies and is widely referred to as “the most unread book of all time”. As a lark, Ellenberg, an American mathematician, invented the “Hawking Index” (HI). The story was created by Jordan Ellenberg in the Wall Street Journal about two years ago.
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