I don’t annotate my books. Personally, I think that defiles the printed page. But I know that some people see annotations as a cherished way of life, a way of reconnecting with themselves as they were across the span of years. These people can look at their books and see what they highlighted years earlier with their pencils or fluorescent markers.
All e-readers let you annotate to your heart’s content. You can underline whatever you want, and your annotations and highlights will, of course, follow you from device to device. That is, assuming you buy devices from the same manufacturer.
I think Amazon will support its own ecosystem for handling annotations, as will Sony. But there’s no interoperability yet for annotations among different devices, and there may never be. For the next ten years, your annotations will probably be tied to your choice of ebook retailer. Once you choose a retailer, you’re going to be more likely to stick with it, because you’re going to want your annotations, highlights, and all the books that you already purchased to follow you around as part of your ongoing library.
But what happens decades from now if people want to see what you wrote in your books—perhaps because of scholarly, archival, or genealogical interests? If you’re not around anymore, or your account with Amazon or Apple is closed, your annotations will be gone.
That’s sad, because annotations add lasting value in helping to understand a person’s path through life. One of my favorite books is a very dense volume called The Road to Xanadu, which was written in 1927 about Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s mental life. Its author, John Livingston Lowes, analyzed all the books that were in Coleridge’s library and books he borrowed from friends, as well as annotations he made in those books and in his journals, and pieced together how Coleridge came up with every word in every line in just one of his poems. The 600-page book attempts to explain exactly how his imagination worked for that one particular poem. That kind of literary detective work simply wouldn’t be possible without annotations left behind by the original author.
No one I know is planning an archive service for annotations. It’s a potential startup opportunity, although a very niche one. Perhaps such a startup will preserve all our ephemeral electronic annotations for posterity. While the current crop of e-readers offers the ability to add annotations, those notes are often a lot more free-form and messier than text entries on a printed page.
For instance, my mom’s cookbook is stained a hundred hues of saffron and turmeric. It’s speckled with tomato paste from numerous attempts to make pasta sauce and splattered with bits of molten butter from exploding Yorkshire puddings. Every page in the cookbook is a food-encrusted testament to meals we once had.
No ebook can capture the history of so many Thanksgivings and Sunday brunches like my mom’s cookbook can. It’s like a combination of a scratch-and-sniff book and a time machine. The food stains themselves are palpable annotations of former meals, and I’ve got to tell you, I still use a print cookbook for my own cooking. It’s better to have cookie batter on your cookbook than on your iPad.
Other annotations are more wordlike, but they capture you as you once were. On my writing desk I have a Wolf Scout book I used as a kid, from the time I was eight years old. It has a list of activities inside it, such as “List the ways you can save water” or “Name four kinds of books that interest you.” Free-form fields follow each activity, filled with the answers in my own handwriting. Below the form, you can see my mother’s signature and the date. So not only do I know to the day when I first learned to tie an overhand knot or put a Band-Aid on my finger, or learned to use a pair of pliers or notify the police of subversive Communist activity in the neighborhood (I grew up at the end of the Cold War after all), but I also have annotations of most of these events in my own handwriting.
My handwriting in the book is labored, cursive, and bold; graphologists could look at my annotations and perhaps learn something about me. But they’d never learn anything beyond the factual from a sterile ebook annotation. There are paint splatters in this old Scout book, mud smudges, and decals from a Pinewood Derby racer that I built with my dad. How could they possibly fit inside an ebook, unless future e-readers allow you to insert photos inside them? (Let it be known that I never did get my merit badge in spotting Communists.)
Is there a viable future for annotations? Perhaps. I see a glimpse of it in a recently launched web service called ReadSocial. This web-based system lets readers not only annotate a given ebook, but also comment on one another’s annotations. Best of all, it works for a variety of different ebook formats, and it’s as easy to use as logging on to Twitter or Facebook.
By working across multiple ebook vendors and being brand neutral, ReadSocial (or one of its competitors) has the potential to become the de facto annotation engine for ebooks. Such a service may not preserve decals from my Pinewood Derby race car or smells from my mom’s cookbook or, for that matter, annotations from any print book, but it may pave the way toward creating compelling conversations in the margins of ebooks.
And after all, isn’t that what we’re looking for? To find a kindred spirit in the pages of a book—the voice of the author or perhaps another reader—to carry on a conversation with? In this spirit, why not connect with others right now? Click on this link to meet a kindred book lover through the conversation about this chapter online.
Launching the Kindle
Working at Amazon was like taking a step back in time to Seattle’s pioneer roots, back when Seattle was the gateway to the Yukon gold rush. Working on Kindle was like living in the Wild West.
For projects that broke new ground, like Kindle, there didn’t seem to be any law, any sheriff, or any real consequences for making wrong decisions, because nobody knew the right ones. People seemed to wear their six-shooters out in the open, taking potshots at one another while hiding behind Donkey Kong machines. When vice presidents argued in the hallways, trigger fingers twitching, I could almost imagine a tumbleweed blowing between them.
It was also impossible to tell reality from fiction. No outsiders had seen the Kindle because it was created in a perfect vacuum from the very beginning. Everyone was trying to do the right thing, and no ideas were off the table. Nothing was too strange to consider. People who thought fast often got their way and ruled the day. It was an early Wild West of ideas and innovation. It was crazy and anarchic, and I liked it.
Download a copy of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. It’s the book that all of Kindle’s hardware code names came from. The book is about a character named Fiona and her “illustrated primer,” a machine designed to look like a book but with links to all libraries, all TV shows, and all human knowledge. (Jeff originally wanted the Kindle code names to come from Star Trek, since he’s such a Trekkie, but more literate minds prevailed.) The book is a treasure trove of other code names for Kindle hardware: Nell, Miranda, and Turing.
So the first time I got a Kindle, it wasn’t called a Kindle but a “Fiona.”
Though primitive by today’s standards, my original Kindle—one of the first Fionas made for select Amazon employees—still works like a charm. True, my Fiona is turning the yellow-gray color of smokers’ teeth, the same way that once white yesteryear computers start to turn an upsetting beige. But it still works, even though it’s been manhandled and chucked many times into my backpack, tossed into many suitcases for trans-Atlantic flights, and left on my truck’s dashboard in the sun for months. And once while walking through Cupertino, California—a city where everyone drives—I got hit by a car while crossing the street, because nobody expects pedestrians in the heart of Silicon Valley. I fell and sprained my arm. But even though my Fiona clattered to the street and got run over by one of the car’s wheels, it still works as great as always.