Michael Doan

When I think about tools that a chef has to use daily, I rarely think about computers. I’ve never thought about this, but chefs have to decide whether to keep a record of their recipes in analog or digital form, or both. Chef Joseph Gillard, executive chef at the Napa Valley Grille in Los Angeles uses a Kindle after spilling red wine jus on his notebook computer:

He began using his Kindle, first purchasing e-versions of dozens of cookbooks from his personal collection so he could pull up recipes quickly when needed—for example, when training employees. “I’m using it as a mobile reference library,” says Mr. Gillard. As for recipes he writes himself, he emails them to himself so he can get to them on the Kindle, too. Now, he’s debating upgrading to an iPad, which he plans to perch on a kitchen stand and connect to a fast Internet connection.

Some chefs go analog with a Moleskine:

Robb White, the dean at the Culinary Institute of Michigan, has filled more than 300 with recipes, each one with a sketch of the dish or a plating idea on the back. Notebooks are designated by entrée or appetizer type, and he stores them by year.

I believe we are nearing the tipping point for ebooks. Amazon reports today that it sells more “Kindle books than all print books – hard cover and paperback – combined.” (emphasis mine)

I’ve been waiting for this day since I bought my first ebook on a Sony PRS-505. I became a believer in ebooks after my wife and I spent one summer day emptying our sagging bookshelf of books to donate to a library. It was hard to let go of some of the books, but we were simply running out of room.

So what’s going to get ebooks to tip¹? First, the medium needs to be more affordable. Amazon’s $114 ad supported Kindle is a good start, but less than $100 would be better². Secondly, the ebooks needs to be device agnostic – scrap the DRM and let me read my book on a Kindle, iPad, Sony eReader, Nook, and whatever device that’s out there.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, was on The Daily Show pitching the Kindle 2.0 back in February. John Stewart, as always, is pretty funny.