I’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, enjoy this one and all its ironies because I bought a Kindle two years later. Originally published as Marginalia and E-Books on February 7, 2007.

Continuing on in my reading of Every Book Its Reader last night, Basbanes talks to Heather Jackson, or H.J. Jackson as she appears on her books. Jackson is an expert of sorts in marginalia, particularly the marginalia of Coleridge. However, she has a fantastic general book on the subject I read several years ago called, what else, Marginalia. So since she is an expert she and Basbanes are talking about how scholars are now quite interested in detailed marginalia by people who aren’t even famous because of what it reveals about the history of reading, not only what people read but how they read it and reacted to it.

Now, you know as well as I do there are three kinds of readers. There are those who write in their books with glee, those who think that if capital punishment is ever warranted it should be given out for the crime of writing in books, and those like me who have strange and unarticulated rules for when it is okay to write in a book and when it isn’t. If you fall into the first or last category, you have probably at one time or other found yourself writing a marginal note in which you tell the author just how dunderheaded she is and if she had only had your point of view the two of you would be getting along so much better about now. And maybe you marginalia-phobes have done this too but only thought it so there is no record of your passionate feelings unless you happened to write it down in a separate notebook and have a good indexing system like Emerson or Locke.

What I am getting at here in a round about way is, that when I write marginal notes I oftentimes feel like I am talking or communing or arguing with the author. I know the author can’t argue back nor does he have any idea of my thoughts, but the feeling is there. But then Basbanes and Jackson had to go and make me grumpy:

Although numerous people throughout history have asserted their ability to commune with books, Jackson told me she does not believe there is a genuine dialogue going on between author and reader, that if there is a conversation, it is one-sided.

Okay, I get that. I never believe I’m conversing with the author and I am well aware of the one-sided nature of the endeavor, but Jackson goes on:

“Erasmus talked about that concept in a letter. There’s a long tradition of people thinking about, and talking about, their books as friends and companions, and obviously they are ideal companions, because they don’t talk back. That’s my point. Sometimes readers imagine that they hear the voice of the author in the words of the book, and they do talk to it. But it always seems a little bit to me to be like heckling.”

Heckling? That hurts. And how can she say that readers imagine they hear the author’s voice? Isn’t voice a literary concept? It is not the author’s speaking voice, but there is definitely an authorial voice. I am a little disappointed and upset by all this and if this book was one that fell into my category of “books it’s okay to write in” I’d be scribbling some choice “heckles” in the margin. But this post will just have to fill in for my marginal heckles.

I’m about to take a small deter, but stay with me because it will lead back to marginalia, promise. In my local newspaper on Monday there was a review of the Sony Reader, you know the e-book reading device that costs $349. The reviewers were a baby boomer who wears reading glasses and a gen Y who has no need of such reading accessories. While they said there were some spiffy things about it like push-button type resizing and it can play music and show illustrations/images, the conclusion was that it’s not quite ready for prime time.

I am not in the least bit tempted or curious about the Sony Reader, I like my paper books thankyouverymuch. But I got to thinking, what would it take to tempt me to try one? Because you know, as much as we might dread and hate it, they will become popular someday. I decided what would get me to try an e-book reader is if it had a stylus and the book had “margins” that I could write in. The ability to take notes in the book and not harm the book or the text–even write and highlight in different colors–and then be able to download the notes to my computer and/or print them, that would tempt me. The reader price would also have to be under $200 and books would have to be significantly less than I could buy them in paper.

Have I just ruined my credentials as a reader by admitting that I would use an e-book if I could write marginalia in it? Think about it though, I bet you’d be tempted too even if it was only a teeny-tiny bit. Be honest!