Hawking Index

Last updated

The Hawking Index (HI) is a mock mathematical measure on how far people will, on average, read through a book before giving up. It was invented by American mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, who created it in a blog for the Wall Street Journal in 2014. [1] The index is named after English physicist Stephen Hawking, whose book A Brief History of Time has been dubbed "the most unread book of all time". [2]

Contents

Calculation

Ellenberg's method of calculating the index draws on the "popular highlights", the five most highlighted passages marked by Amazon Kindle readers of each title. A wide spread of highlights throughout the work means that most readers will have read the entire book, resulting in a high on the index. If the spread of highlights occurs only at the beginning of the book, then it means that fewer people will have read the book completely and it will thus score low on the index. [3] When the index was created, this information was easier to access, as "popular highlights" were available to everyone, but since then this information has only been made available to people who buy the books on Kindle. [2]

Hawking Index scores

When Ellenberg first used the index, he used the following books as his examples. [1] [4] [5]

Book titleAuthorHawking Index
Hard Choices Hillary Clinton 1.9%
Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty 2.4%
Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace 6.4%
A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking 6.6%
Thinking, Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman 6.8%
Lean In Sheryl Sandberg 12.3%
Flash Boys Michael Lewis 21.7%
Fifty Shades of Grey E. L. James 25.9%
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 28.3%
Catching Fire Suzanne Collins 43.4%
The Goldfinch Donna Tartt 98.5%

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Amazon (company)</span> American multinational technology company

Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company, engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. It is considered one of the Big Five American technology companies; the other four are Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.

Mobipocket SA was a French company incorporated in March 2000 that created the .mobi e-book file format and produced the Mobipocket Reader software for mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDA) and desktop operating systems.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E-reader</span> Device for reading e-books

An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals.

The following is a comparison of e-book formats used to create and publish e-books.

Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers designed and marketed by Amazon. Amazon Kindle devices enable users to browse, buy, download, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store. The hardware platform, which Amazon subsidiary Lab126 developed, began as a single device in 2007. Currently, it comprises a range of devices, including e-readers with E Ink electronic paper displays and Kindle applications on all major computing platforms. All Kindle devices integrate with Windows and macOS file systems and Kindle Store content and, as of March 2018, the store had over six million e-books available in the United States.

Goodreads is an American social cataloging website and a subsidiary of Amazon that allows individuals to search its database of books, annotations, quotes, and reviews. Users can sign up and register books to generate library catalogs and reading lists. They can also create their own groups of book suggestions, surveys, polls, blogs, and discussions. The website's offices are located in San Francisco.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jordan Ellenberg</span> American mathematician (born 1971)

Jordan Stuart Ellenberg is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research involves arithmetic geometry. He is also an author of both fiction and non-fiction writing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">EPUB</span> E-book format

EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for electronic publication and is sometimes stylized as ePub. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones, tablets, and computers. EPUB is a technical standard published by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It became an official standard of the IDPF in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook (OEB) standard.

ebook Book-length publication in digital form

An ebook, also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, also on any computer device that features a controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apple Books</span> E-book application by Apple

Apple Books is an e-book reading and store application by Apple Inc. for its iOS, iPadOS and macOS operating systems and devices. It was announced, under the name iBooks, in conjunction with the iPad on January 27, 2010, and was released for the iPhone and iPod Touch in mid-2010, as part of the iOS 4 update. Initially, iBooks was not pre-loaded onto iOS devices, but users could install it free of charge from the iTunes App Store. With the release of iOS 8, it became an integrated app. On June 10, 2013, at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, Craig Federighi announced that iBooks would also be provided with OS X Mavericks in Fall 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kobo eReader</span> Family of e-book readers

The Kobo eReader is an e-reader produced by Toronto-based Kobo Inc. The company's name is an anagram of "book". The original version was released in May 2010 and was marketed as a minimalist alternative to the more expensive e-book readers available at the time. Like most e-readers, the Kobo uses an electronic ink screen. The Arc tablet series, released between 2011 and 2013, was based on LCD technology instead.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ComiXology</span> Online comic distribution platform

Iconology Inc., d/b/a ComiXology, was a cloud-based digital distribution platform for comics owned by Amazon, with over 200 million comic downloads as of September 2013. It offers a selection of more than 100,000 comic books, graphic novels, and manga across Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, Windows 10, and the Internet.

Kindle Direct Publishing is Amazon.com's e-book publishing platform launched in November 2007, concurrently with the first Amazon Kindle device. Originally called Digital Text Platform, the platform allows authors and publishers to publish their books to the Amazon Kindle Store.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E-book lending</span>

E-book lending or elending is a practice in which access to already-purchased downloads or online reads of e-books is made available on a time-limited basis to others. It works around the digital rights management built into online-store-published e-books by limiting access to a purchased e-book file to the borrower, resulting in loss of access to the file by the purchaser for the duration of the borrowing period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oyster (company)</span> Commercial streaming service for digital e-books

Oyster was a commercial streaming service for digital e-books, available for Android, iOS, Kindle Fire, and NOOK HD/HD+ devices. It was also available on any web browser on a desktop or laptop computer. Oyster held over 1 million books in its library, and as of September 2015, the service was only available in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catherine Bybee</span> American writer

Catherine Bybee is a #1 Wall Street Journal, Amazon, and Indie Reader bestselling author. In addition, her books have also graced The New York Times and USA Today bestsellers lists. In total, she has written thirty-nine beloved books that have collectively sold more than 10 million copies and have been translated into more than twenty languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kindle Store</span> Online e-book e-commerce store operated by Amazon

The Kindle Store is an online e-book e-commerce store operated by Amazon as part of its retail website and can be accessed from any Amazon Kindle, Fire tablet, or Kindle mobile app. At the launch of the Kindle in November 2007, the store had more than 88,000 digital titles available in the U.S. store. This number increased to more than 275,000 by late 2008 and exceeded 765,000 by August 2011. In July 2014, there were over 2.7 million titles available. As of March 2018, there are over six million titles available in the U.S. Content from the store is purchased online and downloaded using either Wi-Fi or Amazon's Whispernet to bring the content to the user's device. One of the innovations Amazon brought to the store was one-click purchasing which allowed users to quickly purchase an e-book. The Kindle Store uses a recommendation engine that looks at purchase history, browsing history, and reading activity, and then suggests material it thinks the user will like.

<i>How Not to Be Wrong</i> Book by Jordan Ellenberg

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking, written by Jordan Ellenberg, is a New York Times Best Selling book that connects various economic and societal philosophies with basic mathematics and statistical principles.

Kindle File Format is a proprietary e-book file format created by Amazon.com that can be downloaded and read on devices like smartphones, tablets, computers, or e-readers that have Amazon's Kindle app. E-book files in the Kindle File Format originally had the filename extension .azw; version 8 (KF8) introduced HTML5 & CSS3 features and have the .azw3 extension, and version 10 introduced a new typesetting and layout engine featuring hyphens, kerning, & ligatures and have the .kfx extension.

References

  1. 1 2 Ellenberg, Jordan (July 3, 2014). "The Summer's Most Unread Book Is…". The Wall Street Journal . Retrieved January 1, 2020.
  2. 1 2 Donk, Kelsey (December 9, 2019). "The Hawking Index Is a Mathematical Measure of When People Give Up on Books". Curiosity. Archived from the original on January 1, 2020. Retrieved January 1, 2020.
  3. Sorokanich, Bob (July 6, 2014). "The Books Everyone Starts and No One Finishes, According to Amazon". Gizmodo . Retrieved January 1, 2020.
  4. Dearden, Lizzie (July 8, 2014). "The books many start but few finish: Top 'unread' bestsellers revealed" . The Independent . Archived from the original on 2022-05-09. Retrieved January 1, 2020.
  5. "Top ten most famous books we never finish". Daily Telegraph . Retrieved January 1, 2020.