If you’re like most Kindle users, you probably love the convenience of having highlights and notes saved automatically on every book you read. But if you have an older Kindle or one without Highlights and Notes, there’s a way to disable them. Here’s how:

  1. From the Home screen, tap the Menu button and then tap Settings.
  2. Under “General,” tap Keyboard Settings.
  3. Under “Keyboard Shortcuts,” tap Highlight and Notes.
  4. Tap the toggle switch to turn off Highlights and Notes (you’ll see a message that says “Disable Highlighting & Notes?”). ..

Popular Highlights appear in lots of Kindle books. You’ll come across underlined text while you’re reading, along with a little note saying that there are “386 Highlighters” or something. There are a couple of problems with this:

Popular Highlights break your immersion. If you’re reading your favorite book, you might not be interested in seeing that a sentence has been highlighted by lots of people. Popular Highlights direct your reading and stop you from thinking independently. Sure, a passage might be important but you should find it out for yourself as you read; what’s important to you might not be to others and vice versa. Plus, a teacher telling a single high school class to highlight a particular passage is enough to highlight it on every copy of that Kindle book in the world. Highlights beget more highlights. Once a section is a popular highlight, more people just highlight it and ignore other, possibly more relevant, passages.

So, here’s how to turn them off.

First, open the book you want to turn off Popular Highlights on.

Next, tap the screen to bring up the menu and select the “Aa” button.

Switch over to the “More” tab and toggle off the switch for “Popular Highlights.”

That’s it! You’ll no longer see the underlined text while reading. Popular Highlights sound like a good idea but, in reality, you’re usually better off creating your own if you want them.