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Scribbling in the margins: More musings on who’ll do it
April 20, 2006 | 8:34 am
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By David Rothman
Fess up. I know you’re out there. You can’t read one book without creating another–by annotating the first. Dorothy Thompson‘s biographer Peter Kurth made a similar observation about the subject of American Cassandra, an inveterate scribbler.
But then along comes one of my favorite TeleBlog regulars, Quinn Anya Carey, the brave daughter of Mark “ThoutReader” Carey, to warn that electronic annotation isn’t exactly the rage among her fellow students at the University of Chicago. So what gives here?
Does this mean that Mark will end up living in a trailer park in his old age because no one wants annotation capabilities of the ThoutReader variety, which will allow for forums embedded inside books? Not quite. First off, students are getting their fill of each other and their professors in coffee shops and lecture halls. But typical readers are not that likely to encounter, say, Malcolm Gladwell or Danielle Steele in flesh and blood–hence, the allure of the electronic annotation, which could come in multimedia flavors, not just text.
Publishers and writers can further help the cause of interactivity. Authors can actually annotate. Readers are not just interested in many-to-many; they’re also interested in one-to-many–the “one” being the usual star, the writer. Just as publishers should be mindful of electronic rights issues when signing up authors, they should also require authors of appropriate books to be available for embedded forums.
In some cases, publishers can use not just authors as high-profile annotators, but also others. Consider Pulse: The Coming Age of Systems and Machines Inspired by Living Things. Farrar, Straus and Giroux could cross-pollinate between artificial intelligence gurus and biologists. Readers could preserve the experts’ comments along with the usual text and read everything offline, not just online.
Timely and controversial political books could be another area for interactivity. I look forward to the time when Al Franken and Bill O’Rilley fans will be annotating the books of friends and foes rather than just yelling at each other over talk-radio programs. Perhaps annotation communities of like-minded people could spring up–ready to join together regularly in disemboweling the enemy or refining their own beliefs.
Still another area for annotation, of course, could be romance fiction, where readers could share fantasies.
There you go, Quinn. If this here annotation stuff is as promising as I think, you won’t have to support Mark in his old age.
Related: Who’ll speak out in interactive e-books, and how many will care to? and Free blog serialization of science book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also see information on Sophie, which, like ThoutReader, uses an interactive approach.
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Comments:
Hey now, I didn’t mean there’s no one annotating books in academia.
Just that, in my experience, the interaction with books in the classroom setting is done face-to-face. The digitized (generally pdf) materials we use tend to be created for classroom use. The professor teaches, gives assignments based on that lessons and related readings, and students work (sometimes together) to do those assignments. Guidance and direction are built into the system.
I think the greatest potential for academic annotation comes from self-directed research. In order for a scholar to be successful, classes need to be just a jumping-off point. A minority of the books on our PhD reading list are ever assigned for a class. In order to write any decent paper, you have to go beyond the materials covered face-to-face. Because physical copies of some of these books are hard to come by, electronic versions would really free up the scholar to annotate directly into the text. Furthermore, public notes would be a much more efficient alternative to the “I-disagree-with-what-this-guy-said” genre of papers, where a back-and-forth discussion published in journals can drag on for years.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of annotatable e-books. I just think there are two things currently preventing it from really taking off: 1) the non-annotatable digital format, and 2) the digitization energies focused towards what materials people need now in the classroom, without looking ahead to what materials people will rely on later in their independent research.
Hi, Quinn. Thanks for your thoughts. BTW, I myself am especially excited by the possibilities for distance ed where people can’t enjoy face-to-face contact. – David