Do you take notes in your ebooks? I am a chronic note-taker, so the topic of ebook notes is a fairly significant preoccupation of mine. In terms of note-taking and highlighting, most of the significant ebook apps and devices range somewhere between “O.K. to Functionally Non-Existent”, so there is still lots of room for improvement. To that end, the-always interesting O’Reilly TOC (“How to improve ebook marginalia“) brainstorms some of the ebook note-taking features we’d like to be seeing sooner rather than later –

• Jot notes anywhere you like (e.g. blank pages in the back) to keep track of your overall reaction to the book.
• Highlight non-contiguous phrases on a page, editing out all the boring bits and spotlighting the author’s best points.
• Draw arrows, circles, and all manner of geometric curlicues, reminding you of how this section here relates to that point over there.

The Guardian (“Ebooks: a more civilised way of scribbling in the margins?) also weighs in on ebooks and “the contested area of marginalia and underlinings.” They correctly point out that main virtues of ebook notes is that they are searchable, indexable, and shareable (ideally). I love searchable book notes.  An integrated, easier way to share book notes would be awfully nice, too. GigaOM asks a rather important question: “Who Owns Your Notes in e-Books?”

“You buy a paper book and you physically own it. The same is not true of the e-book; the seller can revoke your “ownership” given a violation of set conditions. Even worse, a company can choose to stop handling a given reader, putting all of the content that has been “purchased” in a legal limbo.

These worst-case scenarios are not likely to happen with the big companies, say Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but the fact is these things can happen. While it would be bad enough to lose the right to read the books you have purchased, what if you’ve taken notes in the books you can no longer access?”

Portability of ebook notes is so, so important; they are the notes that you take, and you should not have them locked within a single device, just because that’s the way things are. I think notes and highlighting exporting is absolutely one of the best things about Amazon Kindle. Lastly, here’s a useful post from the Google Books blog — “Take Note(s): Highlighting your Google eBooks”

David Sedaris knows at least one way to write on a Kindle.

Whether we care to realize it or not, eBooks and eReading devices alter our habits as readers and how we interact with books. The issue of writing in (e)books is still a topic of debate among the bibliophile crowd. After all, eReading devices like the Kindle aren’t called eWriting devices for a reason — although, Barnes & Noble’s strategy with billing the Nook Color as the first-ever “Reader’s Tablet” may portend a blurring in the distinction between reading/writing devices.

Writing on digital books can also be taken quite literally. Example: David Sedaris signing a fan’s Kindle, with the Delphian scribble: “This bespells doom.” Always one to have a funny story to add to a funny story, Sedaris adds, “that he has actually signed ‘at least five’ Kindles, and ‘a fair number of iPods as well, these for audio book listeners.’ A frequent chronicler of his own eccentricities, the author often encounters his readers’ quirks at the book-signing table. ‘The strangest thing I’ve signed is a woman’s artificial leg,’ Mr. Sedaris continued in his e-mail message.”

Marks on a book are a way of personalizing the object, which is precisely the topic that The Guardian’s Books Blog (“Defacing books: the effluence of engagement“) takes up. Physically altering a book is an intrinsic part of the reading process, perhaps even providing our future selves a clue of  past self: “… the person I was when reading it: how I was feeling, where I was sitting, whom I was with.”

Probably my favorite story on this topic was this Vladimir Nabokov anecdote from The New Yorker in his copy of “Fifty-five Short Stories from The New Yorker, 1940-1950” — with a perfectly delivered punchline at the end:

“Nabokov was also a professor of literature, and in his copy of the New Yorker anthology he gave every story a letter grade … Many of the stories did not fare too well, and would not have got their authors into a selective university. Top marks went to Jessamyn West’s “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (A-) and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” (A). Prof. Nabokov awarded only two stories in the anthology an A+: “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” by J. D. Salinger, and “Colette,” by Vladimir Nabokov.” Read more →

Ok, I’ll admit it. I love writing in my books. It’s my preferred way of interacting with the words on a page  – the physical act of putting pencil to paper is sometimes the only way I can really think an idea through. So this week’s article from The New York Times (“Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in Margins“) caught my attention. As it turns out, the future doesn’t appear as dim as the title might suggest (example: “The digital revolution is a good thing for the physical object …  As more people see historical artifacts in electronic form, the more they’re going to want to encounter the real object”), but that’s okay. There are a few bits of entertaining book trivia worth sharing.

For example, the Newberry Library collection in Chicago noted in the article has a number of famous old books, including  a copy of “The Federalist” with Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten notes, which I think is very much as cool as it sounds.

Reading is a necessarily private experience, a transaction between a person and the printed words within a book. But it needn’t be a purely internal process. The historian Studs Terkel felt “that reading a book should not be a passive exercise, but rather a raucous conversation.” A great deal could be learned from books than simply the words on the page; what occurs on the margins can lend insight into the habits and attitudes (good and bad, insightful and dull) of readers in a given historical time. Sociologically, it could be an interesting area of study (for someone else to study, not me). H.J. Jackson (Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books, Yale University Press 2001) adds that,“marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.”

The term “marginalia” is often associated with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, himself a prolific margin writer, in the sort of way that an activity existed long before someone came up with a name for it. Speaking of which, the article thoughtfully includes “Marginalia” by Billy Collins, which rhapsodizes that act of marking up pages which librarians must hate so much:

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?!"

Not surprisingly, Mark Twain had many opinions which he wanted to share, even if only with the pages of his book*. Also not surprisingly, his opinions could be quite caustic: “A cat could do better literature than this,” he onces writes of a particularly bland offering. That’s just silly though. It’s not like we’re talking about monkeys at typewriters here.

In a related piece, The New Republic (“Amazon’s Public Notes and the Future of Reading”) discusses the implications for reader notes in light of the Amazon’s newly released Public Notes feature. While some have bemoaned the inability of ebooks to accommodate the pencil-to-paper interaction of reader and text, something like Amazon’s Public Notes does appear to be a step towards turning that solitary experience of reading into something inherently more social. Any Kindle user so inclined can choose to share their notes and highlights.**

In addition to a few gripes about the limitations — such as the 100-character limit for all public notes — the more interesting question raised in the TNR article is how note-sharing might change the way readers decide to think about note-taking.

“But another, bigger part of the problem with Public Notes is that marginalia has always been primarily a private form of communication, like a diary: a place for readers to mark lines with a particular personal meaning or to jot notes to themselves … To open it up for public consumption requires a rethinking of its purpose.”

Would we self-censor our note-taking habits, if we knew that we’d be publishing those half-articulated thoughts jotted down while reading to anonymous Internet users, as opposed to having our innermost thoughts safely locked away within the pages of our book on a bookshelf? Perhaps. Then again, maybe the relative anonymity of the Internet means that such self-censoring is moot. Public Notes is an interesting social experiment well worth trying. Maybe it’ll provide some kind of insight into the collective Kindle readers’ consciousness, some fleeting sense of online zeitgest, or maybe just some really good Amazon market research. Who knows?

*The Mark Twain House blog has some great images of Mark Twain marginalia.

* *See here for Amazon’s running list of the most publicly noted Kindle books. Sherlock Holmes, Alice in Wonderland, and Stieg Larsson are in the early lead.