Amazon has started to make public the most-highlighted passages in Kindle Books on this webpage. (For the record, I am not a highlighter. I am a dog-earer, which, depending on who you ask, is an even worse crime than writing in a book.) The results are kind of fascinating. It seems that the passages we highlight in books—from novels to business books—are almost exclusively inspirational statements. Here are seven quotes from the top 25:

Type I behavior emerges when people have autonomy over the four T’s: their task, their time, their technique, and their team...Such a simple concept, yet so true: that which we manifest is before us; we are the creators of our own destiny. Be it through intention or ignorance, our successes and our failures have been brought on by none other than ourselves...The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth...The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection...WHAT WE HAVE DONE FOR OURSELVES ALONE DIES WITH US; WHAT WE HAVE DONE FOR OTHERS AND THE WORLD REMAINS AND IS IMMORTAL...When you don’t know what you believe, everything becomes an argument. Everything is debatable. But when you stand for something, decisions are obvious...Passion and satisfaction go hand in hand, and without them, any happiness is only temporary, because there’s nothing to make it last.

They are almost all inspirational, which means that the majority of highlighters are reading books in order to find themselves in the book. Which seems kind of sad, to me. The first non-inspirational quote in the top 50 most highlighted quotes is this one, at number 31:

For inspiration go to Chris Brogan’s “50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business”: http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

It is about making money. So my question is this, Kindle highlighters: Does this mean that The Secret is the perfect book? It's nothing but inspiration and money and dieting.