Turns out that books have always been interactive, but now writing in the margins may be a dying art.
I could fill this whole blog with the growing list of public lamentations over things that are falling by the wayside due to technology. Not that you asked, but on my personal list of MIA niceties are letters and cards in the mail, the pitch-blackness of a movie theater (now lifted to a hazy blue by ever-glowing smartphone screens in people’s laps), old-fashioned scrapbooks and photo albums, being able to peruse friends’ shelves of CDs and books… Yes, it’s all dwindling and disappearing.
Another recent disappearance, as noted by this New York Times article Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins, is marginalia. I don’t usually write in my books (at least not since college), but I love getting a hold of a used book and finding other people’s writings in the margins. It just seems so personal. And some of those other people, like Mark Twain and Nelson Mandela, had some pretty interesting things to say.
So with digital books, the fear is that annotations, written in the idiosyncratic hand of the reader, will disappear. And if they do, will this be on your list of lamentations?
