"Meanwhile, the kind of "serial" book sharing (as Price describes it) that occurs over time is giving way to simultaneous, "synchronous" sharing. With the Kindle, you can see what thousands of other Kindle readers are highlighting in the book you're reading — a fairly astonishing innovation. But the passage of books from hand to hand, gathering inscriptions along the way, is not part of the e-book economy. Will your grandchild inherit your Kindle books? No one knows, but given password protection and the speed at which data becomes obsolete, that seems highly unlikely. Still, as far as posterity goes, the e-book system has some genuine superiorities over the old economy. Annotations exist in the cloud, so if your house burns down they are preserved. Your marginalia is accessible to more than just someone who holds the volume itself — biographers of the future will surely appreciate not having to count on a generous widow bequeathing them their subject's reading copy. With e-books, there's no need to fight over a single physical library copy; no trees need be cut down; unsold books need not be pulped; you don't need to lug books from apartment to apartment; pages will never be dotted with mildew." - Shevonne from Bookmarklet

"But when I think of sorting through the boxes of my grandmother's books — even the ones we couldn't keep, or didn't want — and what we found there, I am grateful not to have been handed her Amazon password instead. Among all the gifts of the electronic age, one of the most paradoxical might be to illuminate something we are beginning to trade away: the particular history, visible and invisible, that can be passed down through the vessel of an old book, inscribed by the hands and the minds of readers who are gone. " - Shevonne

I agree. My best friend gave my son books for every occasion, and wrote in the front and dated them. I'm so glad she did this and now that she's gone, they are priceless. - Trish R

The article is really interesting, and it's something that does make me wonder. I inherited all of my sister's books when she passed away, and they are very special to me. I wonder how that will work with e-books. - Shevonne

it very likely won't happen. - Hieronymous Boosh