The death of marginalia

The New York Times is running an article today on the future, if there is one, of marginalia. The article suggests that writing in books might become a thing of the past as people do more of their reading electronically, which creates new dilemmas for archivists:

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

But most of the article is devoted to instances of celebrity marginalia, and insistence on these examples' historical importance. Unfortunately, the more interesting, speculative questions are left aside, namely those posed by the quote above: what will marginalia of the future look like, and what means, if any, do we have to preserve it? These questions, already hotly debated in library science circles, are left unexplored.