5 Comments

Off topic but my iPad does not fill me with the same joy as the smell of a vintage book

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Julie, I definitely prefer paper books, especially used ones, with that used book smell. But I find that practical considerations (a print edition is not available, or impractical to lug on travel) make e-book editions useful, and I just can't see a technical reason why I can't scribble on virtual pages the same way as real ones.

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I think you can do this with the reMarkable device

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Which, of course, proves it can be done. But the reMarkable is really more of a digital notebook, not a digital book on which you are scribbling notes on digital pages. It is not, for instance, compatible with Kindle books for DRM reasons. I guess my question is more about why isn't this just standard practice for all e-books?

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True. Once DRM gets in, there is all kinds of issues. If you have a pdf or non-DRM epub, you can import into the reMarkable and scribble on the pages (or type with the reMarkable keyboard). You can then export from the reMarkable, and even OCR your scribbles. I do it all the time.

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