As is well known, the inventions of writing and the printing press led to a gradual dematerialization of the text, so that meaning was increasingly understood to inhere in the reproducible form of words, rather than gestures, orality, and the physical characteristics of writing. In the last decade, many have asked whether digital technologies will prompt a similarly changed conception of the literary text, and what will be lost as such a transformation takes shape. 

Answers to these questions may already be evident to those who have yet to invest in a Kindle, iPad, Nook, or other digital reading device, despite the persistent urging of friends who joyfully tell of their lightened backpacks. Most obviously, the selection of books available on e-readers is incompatible with the obscure titles that often occupy our days. And while, as the NY Times reports, a handful of libraries have begun lending a limited selection e-books, most do not. Perhaps more importantly are the pleasures of the material: the textured scar of a bookworm’s repast, the dusty smell of archived time, and of course, the practice of reading with a pen in hand, marking up the margins of a text.

This practice has gained some popular attention recently, notably in Sam Anderson's March 4 NY Times Magazine piece "‘What I Really Want Is Someone Rolling Around in the Text,’" which describes his longstanding fascination with marginalia. Though the marginalia of archival manuscripts can easily be reproduced in digital formats, the experience of scribbling in the margin while reading seems to be emerging as, on the one hand, a locus of authentic if obsolescent reading experience and, on the other, a catalyst for remarkable digital innovation.  

Because of the latter, the question with respect to marginalia may not be: "What will be lost as we begin e-reading?" but "What can be gained?" A spate of new applications are making it increasingly easy to textually annotate e-books. The potential gain for teaching of such innovations in social reading and collective annotation are undeniably impressive--some Townsend Humanities Lab users are already experimenting with text and image annotations in class-based Projects, with exciting results. One application, Social Books, profiled by Jenna Wortham on the NY Times’ Bits blog, will allow users to leave public notes in books, comment on notes left by others, and share notes through Facebook and Twitter. What may be lost, then, as we begin e-reading, may not be marginalia at all, but—as with much else online—privacy.

Perhaps most interesting in Anderson's essay is his point that marginalia represent not an obsolescent aspect of the authentic reading experience, but an expression of the very nature of the social in the age of digital technologies. He writes:

"According to the marginalia scholar H. J. Jackson, the golden age of marginalia lasted from roughly 1700 to 1820. The practice, back then, was surprisingly social — people would mark up books for one another as gifts, or give pointedly annotated novels to potential lovers. Old-school marginalia was — to put it into contemporary cultural terms — a kind of slow-motion, long-form Twitter, or a statusless, meaning-soaked Facebook, or an analog, object-based G-chat."

The challenge, then, will be to adopt such technologies in the classroom without allowing them to simply reproduce the banal drone of the tweet or the Facebook newsfeed.