"Why wired.com is wrong about ebooks"

[Prestidigitweeze]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

I would say that there is a greater difference. Students are taking notes to learn something from someone else. They are not making any changes to the work at all. They are also working with finished/completed items.

Editors are making changes and suggestions to the work - which is not complete and is not down to its final format.

I would argue that the work students do with books is usually related to a separate project which is not a finished/completed item: a thesis, paper, test, report, etc. Books are subordinate to it, therefore their status as inviolate objects is secondary.

Students are building something new out of information they read, and their treatment of the printed page is relative to their method of seizing said information. I cut them more slack than I do the reader who underscores a noteworthy sentence without realizing that, in a second reading, they or someone else might approach the same text in a different way. Hard to discover new things when the score keeps bringing attention to that one sentence.

In my incredibly humble opinion, the real reason not to write in books is to allow for the spontaneity of each reading/reader in the Heraclitean sense (Heraclitus being the guy who said that the river you step into twice is not the same river). It isn't that the book is sacred but rather that the experience of each reading should be allowed to be new.

Is this a privileging of students over casual readers? Definitely not. It's purely a distinction between purposes.

We've all had the experience of returning to a book we'd read in college and finding levels of structure, riches of reference, we hadn't seen before.