[moggie]

This struck me as odd:

“For my grandchildren, the idea that reading is something you do by yourself will seem arcane,” he says. “Why would you want to read by yourself if you can have access to the ideas of others you know and trust, or to the insights of people from all over the world?”

Though what's authored in a book might not be from anyone we know and trust (in itself not a "bad" thing) it's quite likely still a body of (possibly collective) insight already—perhaps even from someone(s) in less-local parts of the world.

Maybe I missed the point, but it felt like the quote was missing that a book is already a view into others' ideas and insights.

That said, even if printed books are to fall out of favor with the majority of literate people, it could still be a good idea to maintain physical libraries of works that many would find essential in the (perhaps unlikely) case that digital records fail or become inconvenient to access.

[randomgyatwork]

That quote was strange to me too, but for another reason, reading is a solitude activity, the point is to think for yourself.

[ashark]

I'm not super interested in the thoughts of those I "know and trust" as I'm reading (since a circle of real friends would be too small and too unlikely to have all read the same things for this to be effective, I'm assuming this is the social-network definition of "know and trust", which is to say "follow on Twitter", so that's an even stronger no) but high-quality, extensive commentary and annotation by multiple experts would be great. Many books have some of this in the form of an introduction and some footnotes/endnotes, but I'd love the ability to turn on much higher levels of this for, say, second readings.

Unfortunately it doesn't seem like ebooks are good at handling even basic annotations—certainly no better than dead-tree books—so I'm not seeing that happening any time soon. Plus if it ever happens it'll probably be some stupid online service, which I don't want. I want it to be part of the book, like DVD commentary tracks, or at least a downloadable add-on file of some kind that sticks around as long as I want it and can be backed up.

[pmontra]

Historically reading was kind of a shared experience. Before press "scribes who copied manuscripts often made marginal annotations that then circulated with the manuscripts and were thus shared with the community; sometimes annotations were copied over to new versions when such manuscripts were later recopied" I'm quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_annotation , references 2 and 3. Interestingly reference 3 is this paper http://jbt.sagepub.com/content/15/3/333 (paywalled PDF, sorry) about the future of annotations.