Tips for Keeping Your Books Clean: Highlighting, Marking, and Note-Taking Habits

[iamthegelo]

Keeping books "clean"

Do you guys/girls highlight, make marks, write notes, etc. on your books? I've found myself trying to keep my books as clean as possible. I guess cause some I consider part of my collection and some because I may want to sell them eventually. I was just curious.

I know that books should serve me. I should do whatever I need to it to learn or reference later but I get a little uneasy if I highlight a passage.

What do you do with your books?

 

[osnarf]

I find it a waste of time to highlight books. All the things that are worthy of noting in a quick skim are usually highlighted in some manner anyways (bolded), or are at least easy to find by looking at the headings. For something more than a quick skim I just re-read the whole section if I forgot something. Not to mention everything looks important when I try to highlight, so the whole page comes out yellow, and it doesn't do me any good anyways :)

On the other hand, if I'm sitting there confused for an hour over something that's in the book, and I finally have an aha moment, I write it in my own words in the margin so I don't have to go through that again.

And I just buy really cheap used/international editon books so I don't have to sell them back.

 

[pongo38]

I used to have respect for books by never marking them. Now, I always use pencil to make notes on the margin, but only if I own the book. I never use a highlighter unless it is on a photocopy of the page.

 

[mathwonk]

I write a lot in the margins of my books, indicating important things, correcting errors, filling in arguments, giving page citations for references, etc... But my handwriting is really messy so my books get messed up pretty badly this way. Mostly I live with it, but sometimes i own two copies, a clean one and a marked up one. I never sell my books back. I only buy books I want to keep forever. I have had some books over 50 years, (Courant calculus).

 

[amy andrews]

I try never to mark my books- I usually take notes in a separate notebook or use sticky notes to mark pages.

 

[iamthegelo]

I use sticky notes as well. They're great when a page references a diagram because I usually redraw it.

When the book is cheap enough, I usually own two. Sometimes I highlight since it makes referencing a little more easier, especially when the book is wordy.

I would like to add that my copy of the Feynman Lectures is full of highlights, notes, etc. My physics books are full of these but my math books are clean.

 

[osnarf]

I usually just white out errors and write over them

 

[Dr Transport]

The best textbooks, just like lab notebooks, will be full of clarifications and coffee stains from constant use. For example, my copy of Jackson is falling apart from the constant use, as are my copies of Arfken, Yu and Cardona and my CRC of Math (integral tables).

They are a tool, not a collection, use them or get rid of them.

 

[Skrew]

I don't write in any of my books.

I view it as defacement.

 

[iamthegelo]

Hmmm, pretty divided. I guess the growing prices of books to some extent are the reason.

 

[turbo]

As I have stated many times here in the past, when I had to buy my own books (college and beyond) I felt free to mark them up. I would take my texts to lectures and make lecture notes in the margins and on blank parts of pages at the ends of chapters. I could re-sell my texts for more than the cost of new texts, as long as the creeps taking kickbacks from the book industry let the current edition ride instead of changing up semester to semester. As a kid from a poor family I found it especially grating that the state university allowed this predatory practice to continue.

I had friends in liberal arts, business, ecology, horticulture, animal husbandry, etc, that didn't get raped this way, but engineering students got screwed badly having to buy the "best and newest" editions of all their texts, and watch them get cycled out of usage again and again. If you sold them back to the textbook vendors, you'd get a dime on a dollar or so. I could sell my old texts for something even after a text-change, as long as the buyer realized that they were getting heavily annotated previous texts that would give them some insight as to how the instructors were going to present the materials in their courses.

I have NO textbooks from college. I couldn't afford not to sell them, so I could move on. The ones I miss the most are huge literature texts from my courses in English Romantic Poetry. Edit: Actually, I have one. It is a copy of the Jerusalem Bible, produced by the Jesuits. By that time, I had established a double major in English literature and philosophy, and that big book followed me around about every day for a semester.

 

[kuahji]

If you know you're going to keep a book and not resell it, I don't see any reason why to not write in them, and highlight them. Personally I do it all the time. I had a friend a explain one time the reason people don't write in their textbooks is because that's usually what people are taught in high school, since they usually reuse the textbooks & they aren't really yours to keep. I haven't decided if this theory is silly or has some merit. But either way, yeah, I like to highlight and write notes in my books.

 

[micromass]

I will try to keep my books as clean as possible. I never write in them and I certainly never highlight something. Although, if there is an error, then I might correct it with a light pencil (depends on what mood I'm in).