Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

6 Prescient Maxims on Advertising from 1918

 

In 1918, Claude Hopkins published Scientific Advertising. It's written with so much certainty, and yet 95 years later, we're still just realizing or grappling with some of what Hopkins knew to be the absolute truth back then. 

Now, much of it was dated. This is a book that, tactically, is about mail orders and door to door salesmen. But enough of it needs to be read by marketers today.

Here are a few excerpts that are particularly timely:

On the consumer-centric approach:

The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else.

On job safety:

The correct methods of procedure have been proved and established. We know what is most effective, and we act on basic law. Advertising, once a gamble, has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures.

On who to hire:

Many of the ablest men in advertising are graduate salesmen. The best we know have been house-to-house canvassers. They may know little of grammar, nothing of rhetoric, but they know how to use words that convince.

On American consumers:

We learn that cheapness is not a strong appeal. Americans are extravagant. They want bargains but not cheapness. They want to feel that they can afford to eat and have and wear the best. Treat them as if they could not and they resent your attitude.

On data-driven marketing:

...An advertising campaign is usually preceded by a very large volume of data. Even an experimental campaign, for effective experiments cost a great deal of work and time.

And then there's one of the greater understatements ever said about the profession:

...This is no lazy mans field.

 

Can't Buy Me Like: The Exclusive Post2Post Blog Tour Interviews with Bob Garfield and Doug Levy

Bob Garfield, one of my favorite writers and critics analyzing the advertising and media fields, has a new book out with Doug Levy, Can't Buy Me Like. Bob and I are pretty close. Okay, we're not best friends who go out to grab truffle fries after the upfronts or anything like that. But, unlike most people in America, I do have a photo of Bob kissing me:

There's a story behind that. But you'll have to buy me a drink first, as this post has nothing to do with why Bob is kissing me there (short answer: he's trying to make my brother Joel jealous). Though there is a connection of sorts. Bob's intimate moment with me arose after doing dinner together at a MediaPost conference in Kohler, Wisconsin last summer. We found some common ground. And the next morning, when I saw him again, we built on that in some rather unexpected way leading to the photo above.

In short, it was all authentic. It was Bob trying to kiss up to me because I'm some blogger who might one day promote his book, and it wasn't me getting all gaga over him just because he's some famous author, NPR radio celebrity, and uber-famous curmudgeon in my industry. And all that is kind of the point of the book Can't Buy Me Like. Marketers can't whore around for likes and resort to their old tricks. They need new tricks, which, hopefully, are not tricks at all.

Tada. Segue achieved. And now here's what you're supposedly here for - the interview with Bob & Doug:

1) Your book focuses a lot on the brand sustainability map. What's one brand you can think of that has gone from Limited to Sustainable? Why do you think it has done so?

Doug: Apple first migrated from the Limited Relationship to the Emotional Relationship quadrant. Though the company was loved by many, few people were actually buying from the company before the launch of the iPod. And while the company stood for something, the brand was selling expensive computers that didn't work well in corporate environments. As a result, Apple nearly went out of business. With the launch of the iPod, then the iPhone and the iPad (which supported the growth of their computer sales), Apple capitalized on the trust it built and moved from the Emotional Relationship to the Sustainable Relationship quadrant. The question now is, with Steve Jobs’ passing, can the company stay true to this purpose?

2) What the heck - what about a brand that has gone in the other direction? Why did it go in reverse, and what lesson can other marketers learn from it?

Bob: Johnson & Johnson is headed in the wrong direction due to one scandal after another, in all cases putting profit before the brand's integrity.

3) If you were to meet with someone who was getting their first-time promotion to a CMO position, what's one bit of advice you'd give them?

Bob: Rent, don't buy.

Doug: What got you here…won’t get you where you want to go. The game has changed.

4) Beyond brands, let's talk about people for a moment. Who's one person in the marketing world who you think really gets the principles of your book?

Bob: Trick question. Almost everybody gets the principles. Acting on them is a different matter.

Doug: Ron Shaich at Panera. Casey Shehan at Patagonia. Eric Ryan at Method.

5) What's one thing you were going to include in the book and wound up cutting but wish you could have left in?

Bob: There was to be a chapter on the relationship-management back-end focusing on a vendor or vendors who supply human/data capacity.

6) You mentioned Krispy Kreme as a great example repeatedly, and while their revenue and stock price has been on a bit of a rebound,revenues, its revenue, profit, and shares are nowhere near what they were from 2001 to 2004, and its brand hardly has the same cachet. Is this really such a great example of a brand to emulate?

Bob: Krispy Kreme was a bubble stock, and its high revenues were pumped up by overexpansion. It is now on a sustainable trajectory based on organic growth. So, in short, yes.

Doug: Not everyone loves them. But the people who love them REALLY love them. And, when they got clear on why and focused on that, their business began a rebound. That's what makes them a brand to emulate.

7) You mention Dell Ideastorm, and for awhile it was THE hot example of social media prowess, but at the same time its sales were plummeting, and its brand and company were tanking in just about any way you could measure. What's your take on what happened to Dell? Can't brands follow all this great advice about connecting with people while falling flat?

Bob: Dell has a combination of a failed business strategy and terrible customer service. Yes, Ideastorm was forward looking, but in the grand scheme of things, it is lipstick on a pig.

Doug: Its a soulless company. It shows that you can get the technique of social media but when the core company is not attractive, it doesn't much matter.

8) Besides your own esteemed work, what's one other book you'd recommend someone read to better understand the ins and outs of marketing today?

Bob: The Network is Your Customer by David Rogers. [Ed.: I'm a big fan of Rogers and his BRITE conference myself.]

Doug: Start with Why by Simon Sinek. 

9) Who are your favorite three people or accounts to follow on Twitter?

Doug: Blogs, more than Twitter… Augie Ray, Seth Godin, Joey Reiman.   

THE END... of sorts.

Want more from Bob and Doug? Follow the rest of the Post2Post tour:

Tuesday, May 28

Renee Hopkins - @Renee_Hopkins

http://www.renee-hopkins.com/has-relationship-era-of-marketing-changed-business-models/

Wednesday, May 29

David Berkowitz - You are here.

Thursday, May 30

Denise Yohn - @DeniseLeeYohn

http://deniseleeyohn.com

Friday, May 31

Jay Ehret - @JayEhret

www.TheMarketingSpot.com

Pop-Up Shop Pops up Yet Again (Thanks, Rushkoff and TechCrunch)

I've had this odd feeling of déjà vu this month, especially as I discover that my first job out of college was at a tech startup that proved to be well ahead of its time.

In 2000, I worked as technical writer, and then a marketing writer, for a startup whose main product was Popupshop.com, which promised 'end-to-end e-commerce in a pop-up window!' In plain English, it meant that you could shop directly within ads online.

Imagine my surprise reading Present Shock, the latest work (and a phenomenal read) by media analyst and critic Douglas Rushkoff and discovering he wound up describing the business model of this startup that died twelve years ago:

On the Web, with the emergence of HTML 5, we are finally witnessing the disappearance of the split between ad and store. In the upcoming rather holistic model of online marketing, the banner ad is no longer a click-through to some other website, but it is the store itself. The ad unfolds and the customer can make a purchase right there and then.* You will be able to buy my next book wherever it is online that you’re finding out about it, without going to Amazon. By embedding stores directly into ads, we reduce the digiphrenia and increase the sales.

Rushkoff, Douglas (2013-03-21). Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Kindle Locations 1849-1853). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

I then got another surprise seeing this story in TechCrunch:

Fresh off its $2 million in Series A funding, in-app mobile payments platform ZooZ is announcing a new product today: in-ad payments. Yes, that’s right, “ad” not “app.” The big idea here is to streamline the checkout process for consumers by addressing some of the challenges with e-commerce on mobile’s small screen, and now connecting that process to mobile banner ads to increase click-to-buy conversions.

With in-ad payments, mobile users will be able checkout by tapping once on a visible banner ad within a mobile app, which then launches ZooZ’s checkout flow. As with ZooZ’s previously launched in-app payments product, the fully native checkout experience here doesn’t require the end user to re-enter their credit card or payment details after their initial sign-up.

This is a tough model to pull off. Which kinds of products would people buy from an ad? How easy will the payment process be especially if you're not first logging into the merchant? How much cross-selling and merchandising can one do within an ad? There are countless other questions and challenges.

Still, it's a reminder not to count out any seemingly hare-brained idea out there. In 2000, I was hardly a true believer in the company; it was an entry-level job that, for the 40-hour work week, amounted to under $13 an hour and yet allowed me to somehow move to New York City, where I've lived ever since. More importantly, it got me into this industry, and I never looked back. Yet it's amazing to think that I was working with some visionaries, and that this model was more than a decade ahead of its time.

The Next Book You Need to Read: To Sell is Human

I'm a fan of the author Dan Pink. I interviewed him more than 10 years ago for eMarketer about his book Free Agent Nation. A Whole New Mind was revelatory. Johnny Bunko didn't do much for me, but I do remember reading it and recall the gist, so that's something. Despite loving his work overall, I still had no interest in reading his recent book To Sell is Human. And yet, for whatever reason, I wound up buying it and, in some moment of weakness, I read it.

I'm so glad  I did.

The introduction of the book talks a lot about non-sales selling - namely, how 40% of our workday is usually trying to persuade people, outside of a typical sales context. Not surprisingly, that applies to my job too. Granted, my job is at a marketing agency that is trying to sell its clients on ways that they can sell more of their products (whether or not the product is tangible). For me, a lot of my day is more on the so-called buy side, where so-called vendors are constantly pitching me, so I deal with dozens of salespeople in a typical week. (Note: I'm not a huge fan of the whole buyer vs seller / vendor distinction, but its simplicity sometimes works, such as in the recent post The Biggest Red Flag from a Vendor).

I digress though.

To Sell is Human is a marvelous book. The best thing about it is that odds are no matter what your profession is, you will wind up doing at least one thing differently (ideally for the better) after reading this. If you can get just one thing out of it, to paraphrase Alan Patricof of Greycroft Ventures, it will be a good use of your time. And you might do or think about far more differently after reading it.

Here are a few highlights from my notes I highlighted. There are some other GREAT ones, but you'll have to read the book yourself, as it won't work to quote him entirely out of context without some of the longer stories involved.

Select quotes:

• "Since Kickstarter launched in 2009, 1.8 million people have funded twenty thousand projects with more than $200 million. In just three years, Kickstarter surpassed the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts as the largest backer of arts projects in the United States." [This is more of an aside in the book, but fascinating nonetheless.]
  
  
• "Start your encounters with the assumption that you’re in a position of lower power. That will help you see the other side’s perspective more accurately, which, in turn, will help you move them."
• "Amazon, like most organizations, has lots of meetings. But at the important ones, alongside the chairs in which his executives, marketing mavens, and software jockeys take their places, Bezos includes one more chair that remains empty. It’s there to remind those assembled who’s really the most important person in the room: the customer."
  
  
• One of the most meaningful sections for me was Pink's look at problem finding vs. problem solving, where problem finders tend to perform better than solvers. He noted, "The Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, now offers a course called 'Problem Finding, Problem Solving' because, as its instructor says, "part of being an innovative leader is being able to frame a problem in interesting ways and . . . to see what the problem really is before you jump in to solve it."'"
• "The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you."

These aren't even the best parts. If that moved you in the slightest, then I just performed that very human act of selling. Now go and buy the book already.

A Meta Review of a Meta Review of My Review of Return on Relationship

Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose wrote a book.

I wrote a book review.

Chuck Kent wrote a review of my book review, comparing it to a review by Drew Neisser.

Really, I just wanted to write a meta review of the meta review of my review of Ted's book just to write the headline above and use the image in this post. Linking to this meta review within this meta review is particularly egregious. You are welcome to keep clicking that link just to see if it ever takes you anywhere else. (Oh wait, I don't sell ads on this blog, so you won't do anything for my CPMs.)

To add a bit more to the conversation though, I'll add a few thoughts that go behind the scenes of penning the review of ROR:

1) I thought I'd just do Ted a favor and skim the book and write a little note about how everyone should go buy it. That was the actual original plan.

2) Plans changed. I wound up getting ahead of schedule with some work projects. And then it got really, really cold in New York and I didn't want to leave the apartment. And then, most importantly, I started reading ROR and found it engaging enough to read and not skim. That led me to start taking a few notes and do something I had no intention of doing: critiquing it.

3) By that logic, if climate change was really just about global warming and it was a balmy day in New York, I probably would have been walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and not getting around to writing a book review.

4) Taking the logic far enough, someone can probably blame Al Gore for inventing the internet and/or climate change, and thus Al Gore is the butterfly that flapped its wings and is responsible for Chuck Kent's meta review. If you play Six Degrees of Al Gore, it will thus lead to Chuck Kent.

5) If you play Six Degrees of Chuck Kent, it will in turn lead to Al Gore. And/or a butterfly.

6) Wait, where was I going with this?

7) Oh, right. 

8) I don't write many book reviews here. When I do, they're often not about business books. It's because the past few years, I have averaged reading more than 1.5 books per week, and well under 10% are in the business genre. Some wind up being relevant professionally without being specifically about my job, such as Your Brain at Work, which is one of the best books I have read in the past few years, and possibly ever. In the past few years, I have probably read more books about Baruch Spinoza or Pablo Escobar (those are for two VERY different reasons) than I have books that are directly connected to my job. 

9) It's quite difficult writing book reviews when I know the author. I wrote a review many years ago, not long after I started blogging, and was far more critical than I was about ROR. I still run into the author. I know he still remembers my review. He is quite good natured about it, but for years I felt awkward about it, and he did make a point of introducing me to someone at a conference by saying, "This is David, the guy who panned my book." I could do without more of those situations.

10) Chuck writes, "...My point is to stop and examine the clubbiness, ego-baiting and intellectually lazy habits that many of us (myself included), give in to in book reviews, blog posts and general content creation." It feels good to not be considered among the intellectually lazy in this one, and I appreciate Chuck's take. I still can't imagine I'll be reviewing too many books. Not all authors are as gracious as Ted and Kathryn, and if I ever get around to writing a book, after putting so much effort into it, I'm not sure how much I'd welcome any criticism - constructive or otherwise.

11) If I do write a book and it isn't universally loved and acclaimed, I will have to remember to do one thing: blame Al Gore.

Book Review: Return on Relationship by Ted Rubin and Kathryn Rose

Ted Rubin was kind enough to share a copy of his new book Return on Relationship, which he co-authored with Kathryn Rose. I’ve known Ted for years and have learned quite a bit from him, whether through seeing him present at several conferences or catching up with him one on one. He is undoubtedly one of the great leaders in social media marketing, so I was curious to see what he put together in this book – or perhaps the non-fiction version of a novella (is there a word for that?). I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Kathryn yet but hope to change that soon enough.

The book is a quick read and a useful handbook, especially for those newer to social media marketing. It doesn’t go too deep into any particular aspect but is a good survey course when it comes to using social media to build loyalty, connect with content creators, and bolster customer service. One area where it struggles is to distinguish relationship marketing from social media marketing, so those who are already current enough with how to use social media for marketing purposes won’t find too much that’s new in this book.

Undoubtedly, there are thousands and thousands of people who will find this book a tremendous resource. There’s little to argue with overall. However, I do think they can add a bit of clarity in a few areas, and rather than just offer a love fest to Ted’s latest work, I’ll share a few thoughts on areas where my perspective differs with what the authors write:

Backward or Forward?

Rubin and Rose write, “The fact that building relationships has only recently become the focal point of marketing seems a bit backward, as relationships should always be the focus of our interactions.”

That seems to miss the point that digital media, and specifically the past decade where social media usage has achieved the necessary scale, has enabled relationship marketing to happen. In the 1980s, when I was a grade school student, I wrote letters to some major corporations to alert them about product defects, such as a promised pack of bubble gum missing from a cereal box, and I often received letters in return, but that was hardly an efficient way to build relationships for the consumer or brand. Similarly, direct mail marketers accumulated a vast amount of data on their customers, but direct mail is hardly the best way for most marketers to regularly engage in personalized communication with thousands or millions of consumers.

Not Just a Social ID

They also refer to “building your Social ID,” touching on five areas in particular:

1. Responsiveness
2. Thought leadership
3. Content creation
4. Relevance
5. Demeanor

It’s a great roundup of what can impact how a brand is perceived online. Yet by calling it a Social ID, the authors risk encouraging readers to create a Social ID that is separate from the brand identity. If Time Warner Cable is incredibly responsive online – especially to someone like me with a larger than average Twitter follower count or Klout score – but can’t string a coherent sentence together over the phone, the Social ID  means nothing. Or consider whether the brand stands for thought leadership. If so, social media can be an enabler of it, and offer new distribution channels for those leading thoughts. But if the brand comes off as a thought leader online and its products lag behind, it will lose its credibility. I have experienced this first-hand at my agency, 360i. When I was one of a number of people working on our Social Marketing Playbook that we released in 2009, we knew it only mattered if we were doing some of the best work in social media marketing. Otherwise, we would have risked alienating our clients. Thoughts mean little without actions to back them up.

Measuring the Return

This is a short book, but one area where I was hoping for more is in the measurement piece. I was very excited to see this addressed, but it didn’t go nearly far enough, especially when the book’s cover urges readers to “start measuring your ROR.”

Early on in the section, the authors quote Erik Qualman who, when asked about the return on investment (ROI) of social media, retorted, “How do you measure the ROI of your phone?” That reminds me of when Charlene Li wrote in her book Open Leadership, “What is the ROI on your fire insurance policy?” Fair point. But Li, who also co-authored Groundswell, has devoted numerous pages of books and reports to then go on and help businesses actually calculate the ROI of social media.

The ROR chapter ends with a sort of tautology formatted into something resembling a haiku: “Social media drives engagement. Engagement drives loyalty. Loyalty correlates directly to increased sales.” Then it closes with “ROR = ROI.”

There are two problems with this. The first is that social media can do far more and far less than drive engagement. Social media can directly impact loyalty beyond just using proxies like engagement, and social media can at times directly contribute to sales – though it doesn’t need to for it to be effective, most of the time. And social media doesn’t necessarily drive engagement at all. I go to all too many brands’ Facebook pages that post pathetic attempts at drivel and generate practically no engagement whatsoever.

Then there’s the ROR = ROI piece. If that’s it, then I’m really confused. Why read a whole book on ROR if I already know how to calculate ROI? What’s different about ROR? From the Zen koan of an equation, I have no idea. I’d love to see this fleshed out more in a subsequent work.

Post-script:

First, Ted and Kathryn couldn't be more gracious in their reception of the review. My first reaction to Ted over email when I read the book was very simple: "I'm not the target audience." He knew that, but he still encouraged me to read and review the book, and I'm glad I took the time to go through it.

Second, Chuck Kent penned a meta-review of this review, comparing it to one written by another friend of mine and Ted's, Drew Neisser. I've enjoyed reading Drew's writing and meeting up with him over the years, and next time I see him, I'll be sure to ask him more about what he learned from ROR, as I would be surprised if I didn't miss a few gems when reading the book.

Related articles

13 Questions With The Social CMO Ted Rubin: Listening, Relationships, and The Social C-Suite

What's Your #RonR? Five Takeaways from the new book Return on Relationship

10 More Social Marketing Experts Offer Key Advice

50 Thought Provoking Social Media Wishes for 2013

Research Highlights from CES 2013

Getting Return on Relationship: a Book Review

The 11 Minute Version of "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty"

Dan Ariely, one of my favorite authors and social scientists, just shared an 11-minute animated video of his talk on his book "The Honest Truth about Dishonesty." 

I love that the video gets into an especially salient point for consumers, marketers, and mobile commerce: 

If you think about it, we're becoming a cashless society. We're becoming a society with a higher distance between us and the consequences of our actions - credit cards, electronic wallets, mortgage backed securities, stock options... Could it be that s the distance increases, people can be dishonest but at the moment don't think of themselves as doing anything dishonest?

I really like the idea that if you pay with Square, for example, you can walk into a Starbucks and have it automatically deduct what you owe without you ever taking your phone out of your pocket (assuming you opted in beforehand). To me, that allows one to have a more personal relationship with the people working there, as it's no longer complicated by the financial transaction. But as Ariely notes, this distance from tangible forms of payment could have adverse consequences as well.

Watch the video below, and read Ariely's blog at danariely.com.

Just a Thought: Humility

Christopher Nolan is an Irish poet and author who suffered from dystonia, though he managed to defy odds and get his voice - and incomparable style - shared with the world. 

In his autobiography Under the Eye of the Clock (written as a novel), my favorite moment was a brief thought on humility. He was a high school aged student meeting a headmaster, and he said to the headmaster:

"You are very humble to care about me." 

Just a Thought: Marginal Costs

In a new series here I'm tentatively entitling "just a thought," I'll share one piece of good advice or thinking from a great book or article. 

Here's Just a Thought from "How Will You Measure Your Life?" by Clayton M. Christensen, with James Allworth and Karen Dillon. The book, written as a sort of 'last lecture' to Christensen's students covers a range of topics, many of which are worth reading and rereading. While the book goes off on many tangents, it's ultimately about the slippery slope of morality. Here's what Christensen writes about marginal costs:

100 Percent of the Time Is Easier Than 98 Percent of the Time

Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be. That instinct to just use the marginal costs hides from us the true cost of our actions.

It's all too easy to think of personal examples here from my life and others. Beyond "just this once," I can think of a lot of examples of "just one more": if I have just one more snack from the vending machine, I'll be fine for dinner, or if I have just one more glass of wine, I'll still feel totally fine the next day. Elsewhere, Christensen writes, "A good theory doesn't change its mine." Consistency and persistence make it mean something.

The Social Life of Books

It's weird getting nostalgic over a first-generation Kindle (image source: Reuters)

The Social Life of Books
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

As a Kindle user since its first model debuted, I've marveled how it has changed my reading habits, and in some ways has changed my life. Some of the most profound changes are the social ones.

When I first started reading my Kindle, I was often riding Manhattan's subways, and I realized that I'd lost a valuable form of social expression. Once, when I was reading a paperback book, a friend of the author's struck up a conversation with me, and I've had other such serendipitous conversations. You lose that with electronic readers; the statement is not about what you're reading but the device with which you're reading it. I'd love to see a Kindle case that displays the cover of my book on the back of it.

Despite the loss of self-expression, there are several digital ways that Amazon makes books social:

·     You can highlight passages or take notes and choose to make them public at kindle.amazon.com.

·     When reading books, you can choose to view the most popular highlights from other readers. Personally, I find this distracting, in the same way that I hated using second-hand textbooks in college. But the so-called wisdom of crowds can draw your attention to passages you might have glossed over initially, and the popular highlights for a book can add to the experience once you finish a book.

·     Amazon sometimes lets you lend books to others for two-week windows. The only catch is that most books that I own don't allow lending. Maybe I just prefer books from stingier publishers.

·     It's easy to share your favorite passages in other digital media. When I published a review of the 28 books I read about Africa in the past several months, I was able to take passages from Kindle highlights and sprinkle them in.

·     You can share passages directly from the Kindle to Twitter or Facebook. It's cumbersome today, but perhaps will work better when Amazon starts having Android-powered devices.

An added bonus with the Kindle is that anything publicly shared is available for anyone to see, presenting a fascinating anthropology, something that wasn't possible when bibliophiles kept handwritten notes' in books' margins. Here are six revealing tidbits from the Kindle's popularity rankings:

1) Timothy Ferriss is bigger than Jesus. Really. His book "The 4-Hour Body" is the most highlighted of all time, ahead of the Bible. Granted, there's only one version of his book right now, but four versions of the Bible in the top 10.

2) Timothy Ferriss is more quotable than Jesus. Among the top 25 most-highlighted passages of all time, there are none from the Bible. There are four from Ferriss. There isn't a Bible highlight in the top 100. Perhaps some think highlighting the Bible is a sin. I'd still pick Jesus when it comes to substance, though. When a quote from Ferriss says to "eat the same few meals over and over again," it makes me yearn for anyone else's gospel.

3) The Bible does alright, though, with 5 of the top 25 highlighted passages coming from David Platt's "Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream." One such passage has him saying, "This is how God works," so with that kind of authoritative position on divine actions, I'm not surprised a higher power put him on the bestseller lists. Another 7 of the top 25 are from "Eat Pray Love, "which I'm assuming from the title is 33% about praying.

4) Jane Austen wrote the most highlighted passage of all time, from "Pride and Prejudice": "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." She also owns the number-five slot. I wonder how many people truly love the quote as opposed to those who just think they should highlight it.

5) People prefer posting public notes about the classics. The four books with the most public notes were written in the 1800s ("The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland," "Dracula," "Pride and Prejudice"), with Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" breaking the streak in the fifth slot.

6) It doesn't take much to make a book rank higher on the list of those with public notes. For instance, I took notes on "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement." On Monday, I made the notes public and became the first person to do so for that work; it then ranked 4,179^th in books with public notes. I did the same thing for "Griftopia: Bubble Machines," "Vampire Squids," and "The Long Con That is Breaking America"; as the tenth person to make notes public, it moved from 361 to 307.

As much as I love the Kindle, I miss the way print books liberate you to share books, have them signed, donate them, mark them up with your own hand, and even forget about them in some hotel room without worrying about it. Despite e-readers' drawbacks, their portability and accessibility won me over, and their potential for socializing books can make them valuable in ways we haven't yet anticipated.