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.