Joel Hughes's Blog

Dog-eared Digital Books

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 09:24:00 -0800

"If I die tomorrow, well, at least my children, who are approaching as we speak, at least they will have a very good idea of what I was like, of what my mind was like, because they will be able to read my books. So maybe there is an immortalizing principle at work even if it's just for your children. Even if they've forgotten you physically, they could never say that they didn't know what their father was like." - Martin Amis [1]

I recently attended the Books in Browsers (BiB) conference [2] at which I heard Bob Stein make the point that there is meaningful and emotional value in annotating written content [3]. While Martin Amis is referring to the act of writing a novel, we could all share experience, in text, across time. If I carefully annotated my thoughts (likes, associations and criticisms) on The Life of Pi [4], with contextual information (an autumnal commute, in a Mancunian bus, aged 24), my children could perform the same act, with the same text, at the same point in their lifetime. This experience could be extremely poignant.

While it occurs with physical books (more frequently in academic genres, perhaps), annotation could be promoted and enhanced through digital reading devices and services. A paper based manuscript is limited by the rate it degrades and its physical size, a digital equivalent (as long at its content can be deciphered) can last, and be expanded, indefinitely. Annotating is not a new concept for the web (and therefore formats like ePub), projects like the Open Annotations Standard [5] have been attempting to solve this problem, with limited success, for some time. One key constraint being the transient nature of the source.

Other BiB talks touched on these subjects. Blaine Cook and Maureen Evans talked about authors being able to use the tools familiar to software developers (source control systems like Git [6]) and social-networkers to aid communal content creation and blur the line between writer and reader (Maureen nurtured a crowd sourced cookery book based on these principals [7]).

Content creation, in this style, might not be appeal to every reader, but note making could. James Bridle's talk covered some of the key features that bookmarks and annotations should provide [8], an appealing idea he described was:

"Traditional books, physical paper books, are fantastic. You can read them cover to cover, bookmark them, dog-ear them, write notes in the margin, underline your favourite passages, treasure them, keep them, and lend them to your friends. Ebooks should let you do these things too - but sometimes they don't." - James Bridle [9]

Taking into account all of the above, there is a strong argument for implementing this kind of functionality within eReading tools. In the Open Books Checklist [8] (item three) includes the following: "You should be able to save these marks separate from the book itself." The Open Annotation proposals share the same ideas. There's another way to look at this.

Borrowing further from software development practices, open source in particular, readers could purchase a "release" of the book. From that point on the book is theirs (their own "version"). Annotations and bookmarks can be added directly to them (in a format that can be hidden/revealed) this version can then be passed on, and on, gaining a life of its own, each reader leaving their mark (as developers leave their comments/foot-prints on a code base). The digital equivalent of browning, dog-eared, written on pages.

As with software, the user's version may deviate from further "releases" made by the original author. These could be merged or ignored at the reader's discretion, this way the supplements can't be separated from their source material (physically or over time). Example usage might include: a teacher annotating a text, then providing this version to their students, who further branch the content. The teacher could choose to merge the best student content back into their version, and when a new text is released choose whether to merge or continue with the version they have with their next class.

My copy of the Life of Pi, becomes our family copy. Each of us leaving impressions, a new edition is irrelevant, ours is the version that means the most.

[1] http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1156/the-art-of-fiction-no-151-marti...

[2] http://bib.archive.org/

[3] http://www.slideshare.net/synch101/bi-b-bob-stein

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_of_Pi

[5] http://www.openannotation.org/

[6] http://git-scm.com/

[7] http://eat-tweet.com/

[8] http://www.openbookmarks.org/checklist/

[9] http://booktwo.org/notebook/everything-is-the-same-only-different/