TaLIC news & announcements

Ok, before I start, I work in the library and so my response is inevitably coloured by that. Here goes:

As far as writing on books goes, hopefully they wouldn't do it, at least not here! Defaced library books - and i do count annotations as defacement - are the bane of my existence at times (speaking as scanning person, I'm supposed to upload clean scans). Having a working copy of your own to write on is one thing, whatever people wish to do to their own things is fine by me, but writing/scribbling/highlighting/commenting/drawing those stupid little brackety things around each paragraph (I hate them!) whatever; doing it on communal property is just rude and annoying.

But having said that, I do agree that sometimes annotations can be as interesting as the text they are in, particularly from, say, a historian's point of view. Imagine looking at a manuscript with Charles Dicken's margin scribble, or Mozart's annotations on a score or something. The famous mathematical conundrum Fermat's Last Theorem, which puzzled mathematicians for centuries was scribbled on a page from his copy of Diophantus' Arithmetica. The margin was apparently too small to include the solution! So I guess it depends on the context. And who's to say that the scribblings of the world's next great philosopher aren't being rubbed out by me as I'm scanning? But if they're done in the library's books, then that's just tough.

So I guess for working texts, maybe the electronic form really is better, you're not destroying something, or altering the next borrower's experience of the text- colouring their response with your own- you're enhancing it for yourself, interacting with it. Perhaps that will mean people treat paper copies with a bit more reverence, and that's fine by me. There is a strong trend right now for books themselves as works of art too, and that could really be interesting.

Oh, and the Craig Mod piece is excellent too.

I was thinking on the issue of media digitalisation after reading this and I think I agree with Mod - as well as of a mind that owning physical books is (unless you're a student with limited shelf space!), something of a pleasure much in the same way as collecting art is. Of course, like Rebecca says, one of the key perks is the guilt-free annotation of those books, and something I myself do frequently (though not always in pencil - firm reassurances to any library bods reading this, you will not find a scratch on any of my loans!).

That said, it irks me a little that we've had to wait so long for a decent, portable, multi-functional device that can adequately display digital books. I'd personally like to see a dual-format as standard, where purchasing the book grants the right to a downloadable version of it. In this way, annotating it need not be permanent although perhaps future historians might lament the loss of the insights we've gained by Firmat et al just as Rebecca said.

Perhaps historians of the future will scour the hard drives of today's Firmats and DaVinci's, looking for insight into their works in temporary files and recycle bins or never-overwritten clusters. I think for now though, they'll probably stick to paper - there is something attractive about committing an idea to hardcopy and I think, the nature of a book makes it much more likely to be found and examined than an errant file on a computer or pda. People throw away technology all the time, I've yet to see anyone throw away a book lightly.