I’m re-reading Walden on paper, in the OUP “World’s Classics” edition. The editor, Stephen Fender, has provided copious notes, tagged in the text with scores of asterisks. Some of these notes are very interesting; others less so. A few are even, to an experienced reader, a bit insulting. I don’t need to be told: “Spartan-like: the ancient Spartans were noted for their simplicity, frugality, and self-discipline”. Nor do I need alerting to the fact that Hercules was set twelve labors to perform, nor am I ignorant of the meaning of the word “slough”: and I had already twigged that it might refer in its context to the Slough of Despond in Pilgrim’s Progress. And so on.
Some readers will be glad of such notes. For me, they are useless interruptions. Because I don’t know what any particular asterisk is for, each time I encounter one I cannot forbear from turning to the back of the book. After a couple of hundred pages of this, I am somewhat ill disposed towards OUP’s editorial policy.
E-books can offer a perfect solution. Such notes could be hyperlinked, and each link graded. Beginning readers could leave them all visible; middling readers like me could hide the elementary ones; and academics could hide all but the most advanced. Or indeed, if the text were being re-read, they could all be hidden, and made visible only when the word or phrase was touched with a finger or stylus.
Onboard reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias could also be enlisted. And with wireless access to the net, of course, the potential is limitless.
Penguin’s Enriched E-book series is a great first step on the road to realizing the potential of E. But that’s all it is – a first step, and there’s a long, long way to go.
How best to render annotations — and how to link them to appropriate selections in a text — is a big concern for academic publishers. I hadn’t considered grading them as well, but that seems like an excellent idea.
One can imagine a real opportunity here for content re-use, as publishers could produce a single ebook of a classic text that includes multiple levels of annotations specifically targeted at different age levels or meeting different educational criteria (for example, in different countries). Also multi-lingual annotations: if I’m a student of French, I’d like to read the original French text, but have it annotated in English.
I, too, reread Walden this summer, but an annotated version, Walden: a fully annotated edition. Ed. by J. S. Cramer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 370 pp, 2004. I also recommend Walden: an annotated edition. Ed. by W. Harding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
See my website on Thoreau at http://homepage.mac.com/donsmith/thoreau.html
There are multiple links there to both digital and paper editions of all of Thoreau’s works and links to analysis as well. The annotated editions above relieve one from having to flip to notes at the back of the book.
I agree with Liza Daly that there are a lot of technical issues about the underlying methods to link these annotations. Back when I was working as an academic librarian with digital library projects, this type of conversation came up a lot about the interrelationship among content. (So much so that it was easy to forget the larger market that would never use these features). While I still feel that e-books are going to be mostly just for a niche audience, this type of annotation capability will serve the niche of scholarly publishing very well.
eReader does a reasonably good job of handling footnote annotations. It will pop a little window up with the footnote, which you can then hide and go back to the text.