Idea: Portable annotations files for ebooks
Something I think would be neat:
A way to create a highlights-and-notes file for an ebook, which you could then distribute to other readers in a way that would let them apply it to their copy of the ebook.
I can imagine at least two different kinds of uses (which have some areas of overlap between them):
- Annotations. A work along the general lines of The Annotated Alice or Stuart Gilbert’s James Joyce’s Ulysses or Le Guin’s “Is Gender Necessary? Redux” or Cliff’s Notes could be sold/distributed as a highlights-and-notes file to be overlaid on the ebook that it annotates. A scholar who wants to emphasize or disagree with parts of a work by another scholar could distribute their own highlights-and-notes.
- Art. A writer could create a highlights-and-notes file to turn a book into a different work. That could take the form of something like Dorst and Abrams’s S., where the handwritten margin notes tell the main story; or something like blackout poetry/erasure poetry, where one writer transforms another writer’s text by removing some or most of it; or something like some kinds of fanfic (say, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), where someone creates another work in the interstices of the original work; or some kinds of hypertext, where someone enriches a work by pointing out (possibly unintended by the original author) connections between different parts of it.
I don’t think there would be a huge market for such a capability, but I do think it could produce some pretty cool and useful and interesting effects.
