The idea of scribbling electronic notes in the margins of e-books is not new—David Rothman mentioned it back in 2006, though I’m sure it’s actually older than that. But last month the New York Times covered the fact that e-books meant scribbling in the margins would be much harder.
ReadWriteWeb reports on an API created by ReadSocial, a new project from the founders of BookGlutton, to try to make e-reading more social. Through a proof of concept Firefox and Chrome extension called Readum that uses Google Books, users can highlight, annotate, and share on Facebook passages from a Google Book. While a lot of the reading we do online is social already, actually annotating specific passages can provide a different sense of the original material than something just posted in response at the end.
Being able to read a text closely, point to a key place in an argument, and offer your insights is one of the cornerstones of literary criticism, and it’s the motivation in many ways for marginalia. The ReadSocial API has great potential to bring this longstanding tradition of close reading online.
It will be interesting to see if it gets adopted and used. Of course, it doesn’t really address the issue raised by the New York Times article, which is that a scribbled-in book is a physical artifact that can survive the ages and possibly inspire someone down the road. It’s still not clear just how much of what we do electronically today will survive into the ages.
You bring up an interesting point on persistence of screen display and associated marginal notes. Paper based books can actually support sequences of annotation in excess of use by a single owner. Screen books are in a way the opposite. The single user may well loose continuity across devices, reading applications and connective networks. Paper lasts more than a lifetime and screen display less.
Chris,
If you mean, literally, done and shown in the margins of what you see of the text, then I think the most expensive Sony is able to do that with the stylus. Am I wrong? Might be! I remember thinking that this was a nice feature when reading a review but my memory on this is very shaky.
The poor disappearing Plastic Logic and Rex tablets could do something like that eventually, they’d said.
But as far as the utility of extracting from a text just what you want and sending it as a point of argument to Facebook readers, that can be done with the Kindle and the Nook and ‘in the margins’ there means right in the ‘location’ area of the text from which it’s extracted.
Wasn’t sure by reading the article..
If you mean, literally, done and shown in the margins of what you see of the text, then I think the most expensive Sony is able to do that with the stylus.
===============================================
[url=www.webicon.co.in]web design[/url]