The Future of Social Reading

Whether or not “marginalia” is your thing, this article is worth a read. It highlights one of the basic and much-debated questions in e-literature: can/should we read socially?

This gave me an epiphany — a grand vision of the future of social reading. I imagined a stack of transparent, margin-size plastic strips containing all of my notes from “Infinite Jest.” These, I thought, could be passed out to my friends, who would paste them into their own copies of the book and then, in turn, give me their marginalia strips, which I would paste into my copy, and we’d all have a big virtual orgy of never-ending literary communion.

— Sam Anderson

(via NYTimes)