Kindle Highlights and Ratings

When reading I've always underlined sentences that make me happy. Once the kids got old enough to understand there's no email or fun on a Kindle I switched from dead tree books, and now the underlining is stored in Amazon's datacenters.

After a few years of highlighting on Kindle I started to wonder if the number of sentences that I liked and the eventual five-star scale rating I gave a book had any correlation. Amazon owns Goodreads and Kindle services sync data into Goodreads, but unfortunately highlight data isn't available through any API.

I was able to put together a little Python to scrape the highlight counts per book (yay, BeautifulSoup) and combine it with page count and rating info from the goodreads APIs. Our family scientist explained "the statistical tests to compare values of a continuous variable across levels of an ordinal variable", and there was no meaningful relationship. Still it makes a nice picture:

The data I pulled only covered books I'd made highlights in, which seems to be about 2/3rds of them. I was happy to see that more than 40% of the books I'd read and highlighted since getting a kindle were written by women, and even better than that over the last two years. That probably comes from following good people on Twitter.

Published: Apr 15, 2019, 4:41:49 AM - Modified: Apr 15, 2019, 1:16:12 PM by Ry4an Brase
Tags: ideas-built, software
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