The social life of books in the humane library

The development of public libraries may have inadvertently brought the age of marginalia to a close but the advent of digital libraries could revive the practice of marginal annotation with new twists and new benefits for social life. Like the physical spaces our bodies inhabit and pass through, books provide both a collection of physical locations—their pages—and an imaginative world for our minds to inhabit. In an earlier era, readers frequently left the imaginative world of the story to jot thoughts and feelings in the physical space of the pages, thus connecting the story’s space to the world of the reader’s experience. Now that digital copies no longer require us to refrain from writing in a shared text, it is possible to create sociable books, texts that support and sustain communities of readers. It remains to be determined how people might respond to opportunities to share their readings through marginalia and how the process of reading for pleasure might be altered by...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: JCDL
• Authors: Yoram Chisik, Nancy Kaplan
• Keywords: Digital Libraries, Imaginative World, JCDL 2006, Physical Space