A safer assumption is that the index will reveal a book’s most striking or useful passages. Sampling issues aside, the main problem is that the index doesn’t tell of the most read books, but where people mark them up, from which Ellenberg has drawn a questionable inference. If most people cannot get through either a 170 page classic novel or 500-odd pages of smut, something is awry with the reading public, or the HI is not what it pretended to be. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, just pipping the 25.9 given to E. The less than scientific rigour was tipped by the 28.3% score given to F. 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.

Capital in the twenty first century