Comments on: E-books can be a fertile field for annotations

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:53:43 +0000

eReader does a reasonably good job of handling footnote annotations. It will pop a little window up with the footnote, which you can then hide and go back to the text.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:13:43 +0000

I agree with Liza Daly that there are a lot of technical issues about the underlying methods to link these annotations. Back when I was working as an academic librarian with digital library projects, this type of conversation came up a lot about the interrelationship among content. (So much so that it was easy to forget the larger market that would never use these features). While I still feel that e-books are going to be mostly just for a niche audience, this type of annotation capability will serve the niche of scholarly publishing very well.

By: Don Smith

Don Smith — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 15:14:39 +0000

I, too, reread Walden this summer, but an annotated version, Walden: a fully annotated edition. Ed. by J. S. Cramer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 370 pp, 2004. I also recommend Walden: an annotated edition. Ed. by W. Harding. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

See my website on Thoreau at http://homepage.mac.com/donsmith/thoreau.html

There are multiple links there to both digital and paper editions of all of Thoreau’s works and links to analysis as well. The annotated editions above relieve one from having to flip to notes at the back of the book.

By: Liza Daly

Liza Daly — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:10:46 +0000

How best to render annotations — and how to link them to appropriate selections in a text — is a big concern for academic publishers. I hadn’t considered grading them as well, but that seems like an excellent idea.

One can imagine a real opportunity here for content re-use, as publishers could produce a single ebook of a classic text that includes multiple levels of annotations specifically targeted at different age levels or meeting different educational criteria (for example, in different countries). Also multi-lingual annotations: if I’m a student of French, I’d like to read the original French text, but have it annotated in English.