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Comment by john_strinlai | Hacker News Reader

it was funny seeing this right below the comment saying "I _love_ buying a used book and finding a previous reader's notes in the margins. It's the greatest.".

different strokes. if you want to ensure you don't get sick from a line being crossed out, buy new.

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I have a book (not authored by Edison) that Thomas Edison scribbled his comments in the margin and I was quite happy to read them! Changing my own nearly-religious belief to never write in a book,I found that it totally changed my experience with the book and the author. There are thousands of copies of any particular modern book and it's no longer my task to preserve that unique copy for after the apocalypse. I would like to imagine my children one day being able to see their father's thoughts and dialogue with authors.

That's incredibly cool actually, what was the book? Could you share anything he wrote which you found especially interesting?

The book is "Making Good in Business" by Roger W. Babson. Babson gifted the book to Edison in 1921. Here is a link to a scan of another copy of the book in the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/bwb_P9-DAU-349/mode/2up

Here is my github repo with scans of the marginalia from Edison: https://github.com/RRWagner/Making-Good-in-Business-Babson-E...

Got excited to check it out. fyi the same image (inscription) somehow got uploaded for all the images.

Thank you for the heads up! There was an error in the conversion process. All the images are there now.

These were interesting:

"History proves that religion is a curse and is the master scheme for Exploitation of man" - p47

"God helps nobody. 20 million perished in the late war — for no fault of theirs Why did God permit this" - p48

This is so condescending. The reason I buy used is that the overwhelming majority of books are out of print and not available digitally. Which makes the vandalism especially egregious!

It's not vandalism. Calling it that is condescending.

You can buy unmarked used books. Just check. (And if you're buying online the state of the book is expected to be in the description.)

vandalism is destruction of someone else's property. that's not what is happening when someone chooses to write in a book that they own.

You noted elsewhere I said "vandalize that wisdom." Perhaps you should think a little more about why I am using the word "vandalize" provocatively and figuratively.

yes, you are using it to emotionally bolster your argument, despite it being an incorrect characterization. it reveals that your argument is not very strong.

It was extremely common back in the 1500/1600s, when books were far more rare and valuable to write in them. Almost every copy of these truly old books has something written in them, often by multiple people as the owners changed. That's part of the history of the book.

they also would get all the words scraped off and get a new book written on the pages, often some religious text.

and so now, some ancient math tehcniques can be unearthed by finding all the layers of writing in a book

Learn what words mean. That comment is not remotely condescending, and scribbling in one's own book (with no indication here that the owner intends to sell it) is not vandalism.

Oh, I recognize your name ... wrong about so many things.

From another one of your comments here:

> No, my argument is that it's totally obnoxious to lend or resell a book that you've written in

But the person who advocated for writing in one's books if desired said nothing about lending or reselling them ... YOU were the first person here, in your response to them, to whine about BUYING such books. Talk about obnoxious!

Responding to you again to tell you to stop making personal attacks. I flagged your other comment. Stuff like this is why people leave HN.

It seems like me insisting that LLMs are stochastic parrots [presumably that's what you're mad about] is beginning to draw personal attacks on totally unrelated threads. Happens a lot. I used to have an account here with my name on it. HN is simply not a safe place to disagree with prevailing tech ideology.

The guy who dishonestly said "This is so condescending" and is making swipes at whole classes of people, accusing them of being obnoxious, is complaining about personal attacks. Someone who has been here less than a month and in that time has rubbed many people the wrong way is talking about why people leave HN. He flags a comment referring to some narcissistic rando resenting people for what they have done with their own property as a personal attack -- who did I attack with such generic phrasing?

And his "presumption" is erroneous, absurd, and misrepresents previous commentary.

Whatever. My HN front end has a mute function and I use it for people acting in bad faith. Ta ta.

If the notes are good it can be a gem. If not, then it also really bothers me.

Another way of saying it is discussing a book with some people will be really rewarding. But others you will rather prefer not to. This is just an instance of a more generalizable rule: people develop preferences regarding who they want to spend their time with.

FWIW, I switched over to the post-it note method (mostly) in the 90s for real live books. Grab a few colors and shapes. Easy to remove if you don't want to share your thoughts with someone else if the book is something you later choose to get rid of.

Well not everyone has the privilege to buy new books, especially course-mandated books that the professor "coincidentally" wrote and costs hundreds of dollars.

I would even say that "crossing out lines you disagree with" is vandalism because a book can always be read by others and come to a different conclusion and debate in their mind from there.

Why treat books as disposable mind scaffolds when they can be used again by others productively and even preserved for later generations? If you found a book to be at least somewhat useful to write notes on, then why would others not also find it useful?

Margin notes are fine though as long as they do not make the main contents of the book unreadable like "crossing out lines".

I think the truth is most printed copies of books are rarely read even once, so the idea of preserving them is noble but realistically not that important. And may be outweighed by benefits accrued to the person currently owning and reading it making the most of it and marking to their hearts content.

I admit I don’t mark up my books but I feel tempted to try

>I would even say that "crossing out lines you disagree with" is vandalism

if you cross out words in a book you borrowed, that is vandalism. if you cross out words in a book you own, by definition, that is not vandalism.

it would be uncool to mark up a textbook you planned to resell at the end of the semester, but it still would not be vandalism assuming you bought the textbook.

Again, depends… I have appreciated my seniors’ notes in some textbooks - especially where the book itself isn’t clear.

This is why "condition" exists for secondhand books. People can choose a written-in one or not. If you can't afford new, note that written-in ones are often even cheaper!

I have been delighted by the writing I've seen in books, especially if it's a copy of a friend or family member, as you feel you are connecting to another reader years later, and the item is no longer identically mass-produced. But maybe it depends on the taste of the person writing in the book.

> Well not everyone has the privilege to buy new books, especially course-mandated books that the professor "coincidentally" wrote and costs hundreds of dollars.

Do you even understand what you sound like? "Writing in something you own is vandalism because poor people".

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