Daniel Wenner's Library tagged annotation →  View Popular

As you will see, they are really variations on the same thing.

First I have to define linking. What I mean by “linking” is essentially “connecting” two or more “spots” together

• What context do you capture at annotation creation?
  
• How much do you capture (document and annotation)?
  
• How do you combine annotations?
  
• What kind of search queries do you need to support?
  
• How do you manage authentication and access control permissions?
  
• etc.

• Where does a Processed Book end and a wiki begin? Conceptually, a wiki is a subset of the Processed Book idea, but we chose to implement PBOS without wiki capability. PBOS puts the original book or text at the center of a universe of annotation, but the text itself remains inviolate. Wikis, on the other hand, allow for the communal rewriting of a text. Not all Processed Books need be wikis, any more than all hardcopy books must have color illustrations. It seems probable that a taxonomy of subgenres of Processed Books will emerge over time.
• How best to accommodate the range of thinking about interactive features? The sheer mass of the literature on different ways of enhancing a text (via hyperlinks, multimedia, smart processes, etc.) makes it difficult to come up with a workable overview. So, with PBOS, we have not tried to anticipate all the kinds of interaction that various people have come up with, but to create an environment where all kinds of interaction could find a home. The measure of success of this strategy will be in the number and kind of features that other developers add to PBOS.
• What is the most effective means to communicate the distinction between features of a Processed Book and the software platform (PBOS) upon which those features can be built? This is a source of frustration for us, as we have not always been able to convey to early reviewers of PBOS that the most important thing is not what PBOS does but what it enables other people to do.
• While the Processed Book revolves around a single text, what kind of issues would arise if instead of a single text, we worked with a collection? It seems probable that a collection would yield certain emergent properties that were not anticipated in PBOS. This is worth investigating, but it would be a separate project.
• What will it take to effect a transition from "primal" books to Processed Books? We believe that all books will someday be Processed Books, but how to get there from where we are today is a difficult challenge. Our view is that this transition will require attention and investment from all sectors, and we thus designed PBOS to accommodate both for–profit and not–for–profit activities.

Electronic text books? Get real! By the time I’ve finished a subject (as an undergrad student), I’ve thumbed backward and forth in them numerous times, and have hand-written notes all over the place.

Even if one could annotate such books digitally, I’d still go for the paper version and hand-writing. There’s something physical about working by hand that gets lost in digital translation.