“I wish somebody told me,” says the poet and social commentator Andrei Codrescu in an interesting rant on NPR, “don’t take candy from strangers when I made my first tax-free Internet purchase. I wish that I had remembered the first one’s free, which is how dealers make new junkies. I wish that every cliche humanity acquired to protect itself from its history of bamboozlement and trickery was sewn on every shirt pocket by a smart mom.”

What’s he going on about? His Amazon Kindle.

As he explains,

I’m reading a new book I downloaded on my Kindle and I noticed an underlined passage. It is surely a mistake, I think. This is a new book. I don’t know about you, but I always hated underlined passages in used books. They derail my private enjoyment.

When somebody offers perception of what’s important, something moronic, usually, which is why I always prefer buying books new so I could make my own moronic marks. But moronic or not, it was all between me and my new book.

And this thing on my Kindle is supposed to be new. And then I discovered that the horror doesn’t stop with the unwelcomed presence of another reader who’s defaced my new book. But it deepens with something called view popular highlights, which will tell you how many morons have underlined before so that not only you do not own the new book you paid for, the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station.

So now you can add to the ease of downloading an e-book the end of the illusion that it is your book. The end of the privileged relation between yourself and your book. And a certainty that you’ve been had.

Let’s hope he knows that Galley Cat picked up his story, and offered their own with instuctions on how to turn off those “popular highlights”:

How To Turn Off Popular Highlights on the Kindle
1. Press the “Home” button to return to your Home screen.
2. Press the Menu button.
3. Select “Settings” on the menu.
4. Select “off” for the Popular Highlights setting.

How To Turn Off Popular Highlights on the Kindle iPhone or iPad App
1. Press the “Home” button to return to your Home screen.
2. Press the “i” button at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
3. Select “off” for the Popular Highlights setting.