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The printed page is slowly but surely ceding ground to e-book platforms like Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, Samsung's Android-based Galaxy Tab, and Apple's market-leading iPad.
The advantages of e-books are obvious: For example, you can store all your books in one gadget, look up words you don't know, or highlight passages so you can revisit them or share them on Facebook or Twitter.
What you might not know, however, is that Amazon
actually tracks every passage you highlight on your Kindle to compile its list of the most highlighted passages of all time, as
BoingBoing notes.
No. 1 on the list, highlighted by 17,784 Kindle users as of today, is a passage from Susanne Collins'
Catching Fire, the second book in her bestselling
Hunger Games trilogy: "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them."
In fact, of the 25 most highlighted passages, only
five are not from
The Hunger Games, which is telling.
The tale of Katniss and her fight against the oppressive Panem regime is a massive hit among its intended young adult audience, as exemplified by the $360 million-and-counting box office take of Lionsgate's movie adaption of the novel. That
The Hunger Games is omnipresent in the most highlighted passages list indicates that the young audience is indeed taking to e-books in huge numbers.
Again, it's another death knell for paper books, which will one day probably become cool, ironic collectibles the way vinyl records are today.
Comment: Israel is the only country in the region with nuclear weapons, and the only aggressor among her neighbours. Not only it does not need any "defense" systems, but the US government could use all those millions they have been spending on Israel to help their own starving, homeless, ailing population.