e-Books and marginalia

I’ve looked at a cou­ple of e-book read­ers in the last month. So far noth­ing com­pelling has appeared. This morn­ing I had the though that the thing that will make me buy an e-book reader is:

mar­gin­a­lia

I love to write in books but I don’t any­more because mar­gin­a­lia influ­ences sec­ond read­ings too much. If I could cre­ate mar­gin­a­lia, (and under­lines, and high­lights, and snarky lit­tle com­ments, and …) that I could then show or hide depend­ing on what I’m try­ing to do at the moment I would be a long way to per­suaded that an e-book reader was in my future.

Or how about the abil­ity to pass around the mar­gin­a­lia that we cre­ate — I could send you a file and you could add my notes as an over­lay to your notes on your copy of the text? How cool would that be? (How cool would the data set of twenty or thirty sets of mar­gin­a­lia for one book be? ooo the pos­si­bil­i­ties for analysis…)

Well, mar­gin­a­lia and a tech­nol­ogy that is read­able by some­one with lousy eyesight.