I recently wrote about my Kindle app on my iPad and the new feature that gives you an estimate of how much longer you need to read to reach the next milestone in the book you’re reading. This is a positive feature that I love. But not everything about my Kindle app, as configured out-of-the-box (ok, out-of-the-download would be more accurate, but it sounds even dorkier than I usually sound) is great.

I love the ability to highlight things in my Kindle app. I especially love the fact that I can bring up everything that I’ve highlighted and see all the snippets on one screen. If you want to see all your highlights, you need to be in a Kindle e-book. Then you touch on the uppermost or lowermost part of the screen so that the menu bar appears. Then touch on the icon of a page with lines on it, just to the right of the book title.

With the most recent update, I noticed that there were some things that were already underlined/selected for highlighting. At first I couldn’t figure out what these were. Eventually I discovered that they are the items that were highlighted by other people. By default, the current version of the Kindle app displays the popular highlights that were made by other people. Don’t get me wrong, I respect every other reader out there, but during an initial reading of a book, I don’t really want to know what other people thought was important. I like to make my own decisions about what matters. So I started searching for how to turn this off. It took me a while, mostly because the Kindle app settings don’t make it obvious that the settings extend below the screen.

So here’s how you turn off the Popular Highlights:

• Go to your Library screen
• Click on the Gear labeled Settings in the lower righthand corner
• Scroll the list upwards to display the Other option
• Touch on Other
• Slide the button next to Popular Highlights so that no green is displayed
• Touch anywhere outside the Settings area

Now when you go into your book, you won’t have the Popular Highlights displayed.

I will admit, after I’ve read a book, I sometimes want to see the popular highlights, so I turn the feature on and then review the Popular Highlights. To see them, do the following (after enabling the Popular Highlights with the instructions above, except sliding the button next to Popular Highlights so that the green part is displayed).

• While inside a Kindle e-book, touch on the very top or very bottom of the screen to display the menu
• Touch on the icon with the bars in the upper leftmost corner of the screen
• Touch Popular Highlights
• Browse what other people thought was interesting or at least highlight worthy

Unfortunately, the display of popular highlights is a global setting that impacts every e-book in your Kindle App, so you can’t turn it on and off by book. I would love that feature. Maybe it’ll be in the next release?