> Why? Books are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out, not treated as precious objects in a way that is completely orthogonal to their use-value.

I'm not being black and white like that. Some books "are to be read, annotated, lived with and lent out" others should be treated with more care.

For an extreme example: if somehow you come to possess the Book of Kells, don't go scribbling your brain farts all over it. You're a modern person who can easily buy paper or a notebook to hold such things.

Growing up, I couldn’t afford new books for school all the time. Ended up thrifting a lot of them. Annotations were like a mixed bag of candy. Sometimes they were your favorite flavor and sometimes they would give you brain aneurysms. Unfortunately that experience makes me treat books as precious objects.