Even when I was a librarian I didn’t mind people writing in books. (Okay, not with big yellow highlighters but pencil or even ink doesn’t annoy me as long as the book is not a special edition.)

What I liked is seeing what others marked as particularly important. Perhaps that was a section I needed to pay more attention.

Annotating text is a good way of reading a book closely. (Of course, not all books deserve a close reading.) But those little gestures from readers past are helpful in browsing through an online edition, too, as seen in this snapshot from a title in Google Books (Of the Decorative Illustration of Books Old and New by Walter Crane ).

At over 350 pages, having a filter of sorts helps to absorb the book quickly.

Collaborative tools for e-books have long been a desired feature by many of us in the digital library community, but there are a lot of underlying technical issues regarding interoperability. Then there’s also the issue of just exactly whose markings and annotations do readers want to see….surely, not everybody’s. Then again, for the many scholarly titles out there….we have to admit…that there’s not many readers for those books in the first place, so perhaps the anonymous marks of a stranger may help rather than hinder.

One of the annoyances of buying books when living abroad is that you may only find the export edition, which is a mass market paperback. If you’re familiar with buying literary fiction in the U.S. as larger-sized trade paperback, then it’s a rather odd sight to see novels by Ondaatje or Pamuk sold in mass market paperback edition. Another term I’ve recently seen for these books: open market editions.

I assume publishers do this small-sized edition out of some slightly lower cost in shipping to far flung places of the world like Argentina? I can think of absolutely no other reason for doing so.

I’ll resort to buying a book in this export edition if it’s my only option. Fortunately, I don’t come across those export editions too often.

But this is another category where having a Kindle or some other e-book reading device might help. A particular problem from a readability perspective with these export editions is that the page layout is not modified for the smaller form factor. The text is simply shrunk down to a smaller size. Somewhere the whole relationship between typography and readability went out the window with these editions.

A bit of self-promotion: my short story, “Forever Unaware”, was just published in the online literary journal Paradigm.

One of the problems with the future of publishing debates (and you know there are so many of those) is that there are a variety of publishers and not every scenario is going to equally fit each and every publisher.

A topic I don’t see mentioned too often is the difference between reading and book buying habits:

Not everyone who reads a lot also buys a lot of books.

The people who buy books represent a smaller segment than people who read. People who borrow mostly from the library or mostly frequent used bookstores are likely people who don’t buy a lot of new books anyway.

Maybe I’m wrong, but publishers are probably more concerned about people who buy books, which is a smaller segment than people who read. Invariably, someone will say that publishers have to decide which industry they are in – the book business or the information business. Good question. But the answer may not be the same for every publisher.

It’s also the same question that libraries face and later I’ll examine how libraries dealt with that.

I really don’t understand hardcover publishing. There are just so few titles that I would ever consider buying in hardcover, but maybe that’s just me. Yet, I would be willing to try a $9.99 e-book of a new book that is currently only in hardcover, such as My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey.

E-books do offer the potential for tempting readers to try a book if the price of the e-book is significantly cheaper, which is the case when comparing to hardcover but not to paperback. Maybe for that reason alone, publishers might continue producing hardcover titles with low print runs but anticipating high rates of sales for e-books due to the perceived bargain factor, though I’m sure that plays havoc with trying to figure out an author’s advance.