“At present, annotating an e-book with a stylus is about as handy as marking up a Norton anthology with a Crayola. The amount of clicking required to two-finger type a note using the Kindle’s mini keyboard is even worse. But as technology (and perhaps our patience) improves, Anderson envisions a kind of free global bazaar of e-marginalia, so that you can read Hemingway, while also reading—in the margins—Gary Shteyngart’s thoughts on reading Hemingway. Or your sister’s. Or Michiko Kakutani’s. (One wonders what would happen if readers were allowed to vote annotations up or down, or even annotate each other’s annotations, as plugins like Commentpress and digress.it now do for blogs. A literary vortex, perhaps.) … Anderson is among the literary vanguard’s optimists, though. Also entering the marginalia debate last week, on NPR’s All Things Considered, was Romanian-American poet Andrei Codrescu, for whom the conversational free-for-all promised by e-books is apparently a tenth circle of hell. Inciting Codrescu’s ire was the ‘popular highlights’ feature on Kindle: the faint dotted underlining that, as Codrescu put it, ‘will tell you how many morons have underlined before so that not only you do not own the new book you paid for, the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station.’”

This is in my wheelhouse, of course. An interesting angle the article never mentions, however, is that there is also the possibility that we’ll lose the marginalia essential to some authors’ archives. As anyone wasting his life on a Ph.D. will tell you, some authors never published the material that tells you the most about them, and their notes in margins of books can end up being vital to biographers and students. I can imagine some of that being lost in the electronic shuffle. I guess, as a margin-scribbler, I have to support anything that would promote reading with a pen.