{"id":21270,"date":"2025-01-25T14:04:46","date_gmt":"2025-01-25T22:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=21270"},"modified":"2025-01-25T14:05:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-25T22:05:04","slug":"idea-portable-annotations-files-for-ebooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2025\/01\/25\/idea-portable-annotations-files-for-ebooks\/","title":{"rendered":"Idea: Portable annotations files for ebooks"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Something I think would be neat:<\/p>\r\n<p>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.<\/p>\r\n<p>I can imagine at least two different kinds of uses (which have some areas of overlap between them):<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n  <li>Annotations. A work along the general lines of <cite>The Annotated Alice<\/cite> or Stuart Gilbert\u2019s <cite>James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/cite> or Le Guin\u2019s \u201cIs Gender Necessary? Redux\u201d or Cliff\u2019s 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.<\/li>\r\n  <li>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\u2019s <cite>S.<\/cite>, where the handwritten margin notes tell the main story; or something like blackout poetry\/erasure poetry, where one writer transforms another writer\u2019s text by removing some or most of it; or something like some kinds of fanfic (say, <cite>Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead<\/cite>), 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.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[125],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ebooks"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21270"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21272,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21270\/revisions\/21272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}