I'm not sure that the future of marginalia is quite so dim. Nor do the folks at ReadSocial, who are working on an API that would, as the name suggests, help open up our digital annotations to others and help make e-reading social.

ReadSocial's API aims to provide a social layer that works on top of and across reading systems. In other words, it means that passages from books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, and so on can be excerpted, annotated, and pushed to our social networks. The API would serve to free content and discussions from being siloed in a single platform

Making Notes in the Margins of the Google Books Library

ReadSocial has developed a proof-of-concept project that uses Google Books and Facebook to demonstrate how this can work. It's called Readum, a Firefox and Chrome extension that lets you highlight any passage from a Google Book, attach a note, and then share it to Facebook - to your wall or to a Facebook group.

Close Reading 2.0

My background in literature, I'll admit, makes me pretty excited about the prospects of this API, and the founders of ReadSocial - Aaron Miller and Travis Alber - share that literary background too. The two are also the co-founders of BookGlutton, and the idea for the ReadSocial API stems in part from their work there, making online reading more social.

Of course, thanks to Web 2.0, much of the reading that we do online has become social, in some way or another. We can share links to articles. We can leave comments. But those comments come at the end of an article or blog post, which arguably means you get quite a different sort of response than you would if you could offer your thoughts in the margins throughout.

Being able to read a text closely, point to a key place in an argument, and offer your insights is one of the cornerstones of literary criticism, and it's the motivation in many ways for marginalia. The ReadSocial API has great potential to bring this longstanding tradition of close reading online.

I tried it out on my own blog website (note to WordPress.com: please make it easier/possible for users to embed script widgets, kthx), and it's pretty tight. Once the user clicks the widget, they can read the book page by page, skip around chapters, chat about it with other cross-platform readers in a slide-out on the left, make comments (public or private) on specific passages in a slide-out on the right, and (for veteran BookGlutton users) even choose from a drop-down menu of groups for further reading.

Anyone who chooses to read the virtual book from the widget will have to complete and submit a four-field membership form, but it's a one-click process that then redirects the user straight to the book. Another downer is that the widget does take over the screen. Once you commit to reading the book, you're done browsing in that window until you close the widget. Nevertheless, it's a fun and interesting tool, and the negative side effects are negligible.

The implications of social online book-reading are many-fold, for example, virtual book clubs and organizational uses. However, the benefit of the widget is that of exposure. For every book embedded on a blog, publishers get a wider audience and more marketing /sales opportunities as more people are exposed to their BookGlutton'd books, and users are exposed to something a bit more substantial than a 250-word scannable masterpiece like this one.