Annotation Microformat

I was reading a book today. This particular book has been borrowed from a friend, so I didn’t want to mark in it. However, the book was good enough to merit buying, and marking, myself. But what if I want to underline and doodle on the pages now, but have the marginalia be digitally searchable and transferrable to other books? Sounds like a web service.

My ideal use case: a web service that may be queried by etext readers to pull down a store of my personal annotations for a given book, which the reader then accurately layers on top of the actual text. Microformat captures underlines, marginalia, etc.

The chief problem: how to create something that will do the layering described above accurately and decomposing gracefully?

June 13th, 2006 | Books, Web

3 comments

Don’t ruin the magic.
Your witty comment is so special becuase it is hard to find. Some things should be buried treasures. I rue the day all things are easily searchable and transparent. There is a place for hard sayings, dark parables, aporias, and your secret marginalia.

Comment by oleg macini — Friday, June 16, 2006 @ 7:20 pm

I’m not suggesting replacing physical books, but simply having some sort of ability to search back on passages and notes that you marked. Countless times have I, in the course of writing some witty trifle, wracked my brain in search of just where that certain apropos quotation that involved the spaghetti noodle incident appeared. My proposal attempts to address such need.

Comment by Noel — Thursday, June 15, 2006 @ 4:17 pm

Quit marking up my books.

As a big fan of physical books, I am inclined to think that they will always do the gloss thing better…at least more interestingly. Finding a hand-scrawled note in a book by a famous person is one thing; uploaded marginalia is something else. The first’s one a treasure.

Comment by macey — Wednesday, June 14, 2006 @ 6:03 pm