Marginalia is the practice of writing comments in the margin of a book. The growing popularity of ebooks is diminishing this practice. There’s a whole literary history of people scribbling in the margins; some of them famous writers.
The New York Times article about marginalia points a one such book: “The Pen and the Book”. The book itself is not a literary masterpiece, but it’s valuable because of one particular scribbler:
The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter Besant, that “nothing could be stupider” than using advertising to sell books as if they were “essential goods” like “salt” or “tobacco.” On another page, Twain made some snide remarks about the big sums being paid to another author of his era, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.
Book lovers who love marginalia1 worry this practice will disappear and the sense of community created by margin writing will be lost forever. From the same NY Times article:
Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work, according to Heather Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto.
I don’t think marginalia is going away. Instead, it’s going to get better with technology. The Kindle, for example, has a public notes feature that “allow you to connect with felow readers by seeing what passages they found meaningful in books you are both reading.”
Some of the public notes that you can follow are from authors like Tony Hsieh of Zappos and author of Delivering Happiness or Seth Godin. In fact, it would seem that technology is enabling us to create a larger community than ever before.
Its worth noting that public notes are simple highlighted passage in an ebook. I don’t think you can actually share your annotation on a particular passage, but I am sure that capability will come with time. Kindle also lets the reader has built-iin Twitter and Facebook integration so the reader can “share meaningful passages with friends and family”2.
Here are a coouple of ideas on how to make e-marginalia even better:
Create an open method/standard for sharing annotation and passages. This open standard will enable users of different platforms (Kindle, iPad, Nook, etc) to share across different devices.
Create an opt-in online repository for the e-marginalia. The repository would be public domain and searchable.
Marginalia is here to stay and it will be better.
