News That Stays News

The Future of Marginalia March 20, 2011

1. I am personally quite fond of drawing lines and checks and lol in the margins of my books-and I’ve avoided buying a Kindle  because you can’t scratch in it. Now we have an article in the Atlantic about what will happen to marginalia once ebooks predominate, and a great essay in the NYT by Sam Anderson, an inveterate scrawler- he described his year of reading (in photos of his marginal notes) over at The Millions.  One potential feature:

Imagine reading, say, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and touching a virtual button so that — ping! — Ernest Hemingway’s marginalia instantly appears, or Ralph Ellison’s, or Mary McCarthy’s. Or imagine you’re reading a particularly thorny passage of “Paradise Lost” and suddenly — zwang! — up pops marginalia from a few centuries of poets (Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Emerson, Eliot, Pound), with their actual handwriting superimposed on the text in front of you. (If someone’s handwriting gave you trouble, you’d be able to toggle between script and print.) You could even “subscribe” to your favorite critic’s marginalia — get, say, one thoroughly marked-up digital book every month. Or, if you preferred to keep it contemporary, you could just read along with your friends in an endless virtual book club — their notes and your notes would show up on one another’s e-readers the moment they were made.

2. Future movie plot alert: cars can be hacked at a distance and while in operation.

Credits: The Browser