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Comment by travisporter | Hacker News Reader

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

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I prefer to write on ruled paper and tuck it into the front cover for the following reasons:

- ruled paper is easier to write on

- you won't run out of space (just add sheets)

- you can rewrite summaries as you revisit books decades later and retuck the new summary

- you can quickly scan the papers to archive a digital copy

- you can remove your notes to lend the book (or not)

- you can transfer your notes to a new edition trivially

- you can be more candid in what you write, knowing it's trivially discarded without giving up the book

- all the notes are in one place and you don't have to thumb through the book looking for where you wrote an idea that you half-remember

- you have space to draw diagrams if appropriate

- you can find something on the internet that importantly relates, print off a page or two, and adjunct your notes

- you can do extensive internet research and build a whole matching folder of contents on your laptop, but you can print a page of Title/URL's to adjunct your notes as a backup (and for anyone who borrows the book+notes)

(edit: formatting)

Scholars from the middle ages wrote on the edges of their scrolls and codexes. Some of these notes are very interesting and useful to scholars. In elementary and primary school most are taught not to write in books because they have to be used for decades, but there is a long tradition of taking notes in books. They are very inexpensive now compared to the past and when you write in the you leave a little extra something for posterity.

The era is not the same. Our scribing in the margins is significantly less valuable than that of medieval scholars, because our mediums for recording, storing, archiving, and sharing information are significantly less restricted.

The levels of waste produced in the modern era are unimaginably higher than then, as well, so our responsibilities are completely different.

I had the same problem but my instructor told me: a book devoid of scribbles is a book that hasn’t been engaged with deeply. If you have to, buy two copies of a book — one for display and another to scribble in, knowing that you’ll truly own the scribbled copy because you won’t be able to sell it.

Post-its work. For me I use a mechanical pencil.

It may help to look at it this way:

A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.

Or it is owned by the library

Good point, though I will say that I've checked out a lot of library books that have had useful markings people have put in them, though I wouldn't personally mark something that isn't my own property that way.

Your insistence on this kind of 'consumptive' and 'territory-marking' ownership of books is kind of silly IMHO.

I mean, suppose you have a 100 books. You're not reading more than 2 or 3 of them at once, if that; and it's not like you're doing anything with the rest other than keeping them on a shelf.

Now, Once you either have a family, or have friends with similar interests, or with kinds of similar interests etc - those 98 (or 100) books become something you lend, or even give away. And when you get older, you will pass on your entire library, at some point, or sell it off, or bequeath it etc. At any of these points, you want the book to be free of your personal jots and notes, and as close to pristine condition as possible, for the other readers.

Write your notes in a notebook, or on your PC or laptop (or whatever). They'll also be searchable and easily editable.

> And when you get older, you will pass on your entire library, at some point, or sell it off, or bequeath it etc. At any of these points, you want the book to be free of your personal jots and notes

While I generally have a communitarian orientation, I predict that as I approach this point, other end-of-life matters will occupy my headspace to a greater degree than any psychic rumblings about the odd marginalia in my dusty collection.

As an aside (because for the mere mortals among us it doesn’t apply) occasionally some historical inferences are made based on the reader’s margin notations.

I was using Post-Its to mark pages and add comments, but I stopped after reading some warnings about the glue damaging pages:

https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/post-it-or-not-post-it

http://libraries.ucsd.edu/preservation/postits.html

It's not clear from these articles how soon damage becomes apparent; I haven't noticed any yet in books which had Post-Its. It may not matter if you don't intend your books to have archival value.

I've tried Book Darts for marking pages, and they can also be used like paper clips to hold notes. I write short notes in pencil, but try to avoid dark leads which make marks hard to erase.

Second link of yours doesn't work for me.

I have at least a few Post-it notes in every book. Some sitting there for thirty years or more. Never experienced any problem. Always used the real Post-it from 3M.

Here's a working second link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110128174227/http://libraries....

Used to feel the same way. But I've developed an appreciation for secondhand marked books, thinking about who was the previous reader. It kind of destigmatized it for me.

Same. I once had a professor who heard that and said “of course, you treat books like they’re sacred objects.”

I do keep a notebook where I write about random stuff and a lot of thinking about what I’m reading goes in there.

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