At present, annotating an e-book with a stylus is about as handy as marking up a Norton anthology with a Crayola. The amount of clicking required to two-finger type a note using the Kindle's mini keyboard is even worse. But as technology (and perhaps our patience) improves, Anderson envisions a kind of free global bazaar of e-marginalia, so that you can read Hemingway, while also reading--in the margins—Gary Shteyngart's thoughts on reading Hemingway. Or your sister's. Or Michiko Kakutani's. (One wonders what would happen if readers were allowed to vote annotations up or down, or even annotate each other's annotations, as plugins like Commentpress and digress.it now do for blogs. A literary vortex, perhaps.)

"I want, in short, marginalia, everywhere, all the time," Anderson concludes. Welcome to the twenty-first century, kids, where even reading is social, networked activity.

Anderson is among the literary vanguard's optimists, though. Also entering the marginalia debate last week, on NPR's All Things Considered, was Romanian-American poet Andrei Codrescu, for whom the conversational free-for-all promised by e-books is apparently a tenth circle of hell. Inciting Codrescu's ire was the "popular highlights" feature on Kindle: the faint dotted underlining that, as Codrescu put it, "will tell you how many morons have underlined before so that not only you do not own the new book you paid for, the entire experience of reading is shattered by the presence of a mob that agitates inside your text like strangers in a train station."

What is to be done? As Codrescu lays it out, in his slow, menacing growl, this is "the end of the privileged relation between yourself and your book," and you, dear reader, have no privacy and no recourse. Okay, well—no recourse except turning off "popular highlights," which, on my Kindle, takes about ten clicks and an equal number of seconds.

The idea behind "popular highlights" isn't exactly revolutionary, either. We have long allowed others to draw our attention to a novel's particularly vital or artful passages.2 When you read Crime and Punishment as an undergraduate, for example, your Russian literature professor dedicated a full week of lectures to Raskolnikov's confession and skipped over much of the rest. Good literature is more than the sum of its best passages, but it's worth having a few guideposts that point to the ones most worthy of attention. And if you don't trust the wiki of would-be English lit professors—191 of who, I see, have highlighted Franzen's thesis in Freedom, "The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage"—well, turn the feature off. As Sam Anderson observes, like director's commentary, e-marginalia need not be anything other than value-added.