Sales numbers for Hillary Clinton’s new book “Hard Choices” are the data making the headlines, but how many people are actually reading it? A simple test jokingly called the “Hawking Test” suggests that few people who purchased the tome were ambitious enough to finish it.
Devised by Jordan Ellenberg from the University of Wisconsin, the test looks at the Popular Highlights feature on Kindle e-readers, which allows users to digitally underline their favorite lines of a text. Ellenberg’s test, which he jokingly named after Stephen Hawking’s famously unread book “A Brief History of Time,” averages the page numbers of a book’s more popular highlights, then divides them by the number of pages in the book. The resulting percentage gave a perspective of where a book’s most memorable phrases were located. If the five most-underlined quotes from a book are at the beginning, it’s a good bet that few readers made it to the end.
Now, this is a lot of pseudo-scientific stats crunching which would no doubt fail woefully when applied to a book like “A Tale of Two Cities” or “Anna Karenina,” which opens with a zinger. Still, Ellenberg’s results are good for a laugh.
Out of the selection of summer bestsellers Ellenberg studied, “Hard Choices” took the prize for most unread book. According to his numbers, only 1.9 percent of readers finished it. That is less than finished Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” or David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” And when more people have the willpower to wade through 1,100 pages of satire and stream of consciousness than your biography, it does send a message.
It seems like “Hard Choices” is more the book you buy for your coffee table than the one you take to the beach.
