[obscura]

To digress from the main point: the suggestion of writing in (physical) books makes me cringe. Once you do so, they become absolutely worthless to anyone but you. Trying reading a book that someone else has underlined and/or annotated - it's highly distracting and annoying.

[mistersquid]

I used to be a professor of American Literature. I literally owned thousands of books in the margins of which I wrote copious notes for research and teaching.

When I left academia to move cross country, I had a yard sale and at the end of the day a few hundred books were left over.

A young man who had come by earlier still had some interest in the books and so I bequeathed them to him.

Then I moved cross country.

Over five years later, I received a FB message from someone who asked if I had ever taught English in Ohio, and I confirmed that I had.

He replied he wanted to thank me because he was the recipient of those books. He was a Ph.D. student in Math and he read many of the books he got from me and said he learned so much about literature and writing that he never would have as a result of the notes in my margin.

I was humbled that he found my scrawlings worth reading and even more humbled he was able to learn something from them. I honestly think his intelligence was the real key driving his learning, but I am beyond grateful that whatever notes I left in the margins of those books provided enough information to encourage a self-motivated learner to think deeply about the works he was reading.

So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller understanding of the material so annotated.

EDIT: Change "and" to "to be" in last sentence.

[obscura]

> So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller understanding of the material so annotated.

The problem is that there's no guarantee that your marks/annotations will add value for the next reader. It depends on who you are.

Of course, such value is subjective, so it depends on who the second reader is.

Because of this, my preference is to have an unmarked book.

Also, the way in which you mark is the book makes a difference. Using the margins is fine - I can live with that. But when the body text is underlined en masse or seemingly arbitrarily with pen and by freehand, I think it's really hard to argue that value has been added.

[shanusmagnus]

Strongly disagree. There is nothing quite like the pleasure I get from a used book which someone has thoughtfully annotated. I would pay a premium for it, in fact.

[obscura]

I stated my view rather strongly. Thoughtful annotation is fine; annotation that means little to anyone but you or messily underlining the body text isn't very helpful, IMO.

[dragonwriter]

That an approach minimizes utility to others of an instrument it uses does not rebut the idea that it is a valid means of maximizing utility for you.

[obscura]

Perfectly correct. However, my comment was not about the approach to learning - hence me labelling it a digression.