Thursday, October 08, 2009

Amazon stat

Have you seen the new Amazon.com feature where you can look at the readability stats of the book? This book by my aesthetics teacher is harder to read than 97% of other books, while Infinite Jest is only harder to read than 35% of other books (though it's longer than 99% of the books on Amazon). McCarthy's Border trilogy is amazingly easy to read in comparison, with a Flesch-Kincaid level of 4.4 (meaning a 4th grader could read it). And, of course, Proust has longer sentences than 99% of other books (36.8). Unfortunately this feature is only available to the books for which the publisher has consented to have the "look inside!" feature available, which isn't all of them... but fun times! I wonder if the stats include children's books.

1 comment:

Tiff said...

woah... never knew that. Dude, that would be so cute if kids rated the readability of children's books.