I buy used books: it sucks to see someone else's notes scribbled all over the page. It's like a really annoying guy whispering at you with vapid explanations while you're trying to pay attention to a lecture.
"Cross out stuff you disagree with" actually makes me sick.
It also seems useless for understanding and retention, since highlighting is almost always misleading and margin notes are almost always empty. If you want to write notes, get a notebook, which gives you space to write real thoughts down. I use a trapper-keeper.
I disagree. I love buying used books and seeing what other people found interesting, whether it's by way of notes in the margins, highlights, etc. I also love it when people write their name in the front of the book and when they read it. I like the idea of a single copy of a book making its way among many people, all adding their own thoughts.
Same reason I miss those library cards found in the back of books. I enjoyed seeing the history a book had, how years could pass without anyone checking it out or seeing a flurry of checkouts.
If only people did this with care. I have seen too many books where people just highlight everything.
There is nothing wrong with scribbling in your own books.
There is also nothing wrong with donating such books with clearly written disclaimer on the front page about the condition of the book.
Repackaging as 99% likenew and selling them should be a crime though.
I’ll never forget seeing a girl in a cafe highlight, line by line, nearly an entire page of a textbook. Watching the page curl from the wetness, almost as if writhing in pain.
I'll (lightheartedly) come to their defense to say that this is how I and a lot of my peers made it through med school. The wetness of the page indeed unlocked some supressed memories.
I think it's a combination of a ritual and some sort of somewhat-more-elevated engagement (or wishing thereof) with the material. Somewhere between meditative ritual and attention aid. I doubt it helped much, if at all - except for Stabilo; they were the true winners.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Totally agreed. I find it distracting working through a book that's been marked up by someone else. In fact, I get the same feeling even if I marked it up myself, which is why I stopped writing in books. I would prefer to keep my thoughts and the author's thoughts separate. When I want to know what the author thinks, I'll go to the book; when I want to remember what I thought, I'll go to my notes.
Your argument is that in order for you to have a better experience the previous owner should not “ruin” the book for you. I’ve read better arguments on bathroom stalls.
No, my argument is that it's totally obnoxious to lend or resell a book that you've written in, and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with. It is precisely what Socrates warned us about.
I'd say this is a problem with the seller's communication, not the use of the book. If the seller didn't specify that the book was marked up, I agree with your sentiment. The act of writing in a book and selling it isn't the issue, but setting false expectations to whoever you're selling it to is.
> and it's a shallow way of taking notes to begin with
Are we really going to speak down to how someone uses a bunch of paper bound together? That's how they wanted to use it, which is cool, it's just not how you like it.
My intention is less "talk down" and more "Socrates was right." Too much of note-taking is a ritualistic behavior that actually hinders understanding and retention. I think highlighting / circling / crossing out / etc is by far the worst, but margin notes are also bad.
It is very frustrating the number of people who say "it's their property, they can do whatever they want" and similar comments, all of which are missing the point. Yes. It is legal to write on your own property. I know thay. It's my opinion that they're doing something that is guaranteed to harm overall human knowledge: whoever purchases/inherits/digitzes the book has to deal with it. And it almost certainly harms their own understanding of the book.
I printed this out just so I could cross out every line except for one. And now, with renewed mental confusion, I wrestle with my sins against humanity.
We don't even know if Socrates not writing his teachings was a principled stance to begin with, so "Socrates was right" is a shaky place to start your argument. Also "Socrates said writing is bad, so don't write in this piece of writing that you didn't force me to buy" is one of the weirdest pieces of circular logic I've ever come across.
Even if we take for granted that it was principled, it almost certainly wasn't pointed at marginalia. The argument (that Plato put in his mouth, through written text, no less) is that writing that substitutes for internal recollection can't answer back. It's an argument against outsourcing a thought to fixed text. A margin note is the opposite: it's the reader talking back to the text.
You have a personal preference about buying unmarked books, and you retreat to a Grand Unifying Socratic Theory whenever someone challenges it.
> it almost certainly harms their own understanding of the book
What? For all people who ever mark up a book in the margins or highlight passages? How could you possibly know that?
> they're doing something that is guaranteed to harm overall human knowledge
Also what? Human knowledge is necessarily a collaborative effort. Reading a text with another person's notes alongside it is just another way to engage with it. I'll maybe grant you highlighting since it's been shown to not help with retention all that much.
We have a deeper understanding of some of the most famous thinkers in history because we have books that they marked up to help us understand how they engaged with specific texts. This is invaluable for "overall human knowledge."
Herman Melville marked up his copies of Shakespeare's works and that shaped how scholars read Moby-Dick. Did he "harm overall human knowledge" by doing that?
Ok then please explain why Socrates is better than margin notes for an assumed purpose, because that is not reasonable common knowledge.
If by that you meant to suggest that for formal study, some kind of self-review process combined with cold written practice/rehearsal sustained under interleaved spacing, then that is likely the gold standard for comprehension and memorization. But most people don't even know that, either.
But the main premise is we should not assume all book reading is for rigorous self study. Margin notes can be useful for other purposes than direct understanding/retention (I admittedly don't know the psychology evidence for it but many academics routinely write margin notes here and there on (poorly written/edited) papers for purposes of idea generation, scientific criticism, etc. Presumably the Edison example mentioned above would have been more like that.).
You are correct that the reference is a little obscure -- if my memory serves it's Plato's Phaedrus.
Plato argues, in a book, in the voice of his mentor Socrates, that books will destroy knowledge. And the reason is precisely to do with the thing that Socrates is famous for, his Socratic Method of asking his students (or rival politicians or anyone) questions about what they claimed to know, engaging them in a real discussion where we come to things that we agree about and then build that agreed knowledge-base incrementally. For Socrates, a book could never provide that experience; you cannot ask the book a question.
How dare you gatekeep how people interact with literary material? Who(M)ever purchases/inherits/ditigizes/burns a book has to deal with it, and that dealing with could include ignoring it like a grown up, using some whiteout, or if digitizing, using any of the myriad photo editing software available. Sure, maybe don't put your grocery list on a first edition of some rare Chaucer book, but Chicken Soup for the Teenager's Soul? Study guides? Infinte Jest?
A book with notes is a guarantee that the book didn't spend its life sitting on a bookshelf not being read. If people are reading it is a net positive for overall human knowledge.
Lastly, your usage of Socratic teachings is a hollow appeal to authority. Socrates is dead and a modest library in an elementary school would surely have brought him to tears had he known how far we've come as a species, much less the remainder of books currently available.
Probably the most treasured item I own is a novel a good friend of mine gave me as a gift. It was one of their favourite books, and they'd highlight lines and sections that resonated with them by putting brackets around them using a pen. Coming across those sections, and learning a bit more about them in the process, is like finding little nuggets of gold.
But I get where you're coming from as well. I guess it just really depends on the context of who/what/why when it comes to reading.
GP makes no mention of re-selling. They explicitly talk about revisiting. Your comment would have done better as a standalone as opposed to a response to them.
And not that it matters, but "cross out" doesn't imply "destroy beyond recognition." A simple strike-through is sufficient to keep the text legible (so you remember what it is you disagree with).
it's totally obnoxious to buy a copy of a book with notes in it and complain about those notes. 2¢
how are you supposed to know the book has been scribbled on if you buy it online, as you must do for the great majority of used books you might want to acquire?
read the description of the ad when buying.
if it doesn't clarify in the description, ask or don't buy.
Aside from shallow, uncritical notes, consider that annotating in a margin is evidence that a reader is actively engaging with a text.
Very often when I write in margins it's to question or argue against what's written (e.g. "really? what about ...", or "no, contradicts ...") which, to me, seems in line with the dialectic process Socrates promoted. Multiple sides, truth-seeking.
Sure, having a spacious notebook on the side is even better. But it's the same goal, isn't it? Engage more deeply with a text and encourage questioning as you read it, while it's still fresh.
Sometimes you have the drastic misfortune of someone totally off the rails writing crazy crap in it though, or a 3 year old experimenting with crayons. Not what the Stephenson article is about, but that sucks.
Amazon's used prices are usually set by booksellers that base their prices on stuff like this for some books... When you get to like old cheap paperback romances though, or that .01 plus shipping, you might or might not.
I would be pissed if I expected a clean, un-scribbled-on book I wanted and it was represented as such, but got that.
> bathroom stalls
That's like, elite literary territory though. Let's stick to the discussion on books.
The first time I read "this sentence is false" it was scrawled in a bathroom stall in the philosophy department. Seemed appropriate. Left me wondering how many other people had also sat there pondering it for a few moments, certainly more than that had called that number for a good time.
Perhaps "this sentence is false" was actually the precursor to "Jeopardy", though.
Some come here to sit and think, but I come here to...
(if you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the seatie)
I would never sell my marked up books. They're too precious.
You may dislike buying used books like that, but the purpose of the previous owner wasn't to satisfy your future desire for a pristine copy. The purpose was his own knowledge. If that's what works for him, so be it. It's his book.
So it's a little self-centered to make this about you. It's not.
Then don't buy used books? They are _used_. If you want a new book, buy a new book?
I read two books recently that are out of print. One of them (Georges Rey's Contemporary Philosophy of Mind) is $150 on Amazon, and out of stock. The other (Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, and Ends) isn't on Amazon at all. Used bookstores are the only viable option.
Books are treasures. The second book is an enormously valuable source of wisdom. I am glad nobody vandalized that wisdom with marginalia and highlighting.
>vandalized
for someone so concerned about knowledge, you don't seem to be too worried about continually using this word incorrectly.
different people work in different ways. just because you hate it doesn't mean it won't be helpful for others.
also if you're buying used books, expect them to be used!
"expect them to be used!"
I would expect them to be in the condition they were graded as. I'll avoid poor or fair condition books that have lots of marking in them. Good books that have minimal marking should be fine to me.
Suit yourself, my family ended up with two used copies of "The Hobbit" and we kept the one that some kid had marked up.
I mean, that sounds like a you problem. Buy a new book or check to make sure the used book is not marked up before buying it.
Obviously (I hope), once you've grafittied your book, you shouldn't sell it as unaltered!
That doesn't mean scribbling in your own book is wrong.
You can totally mark up your books. No issue with that, if you like it. I don't personally, but I don't see why someone shouldn't do it. Now should you sell those books? Probably not.
It's 100% okay for people to write in their own books, and it's okay for them to donate or sell them after the fact as long as they don't hide the fact they are written in.
No one is forcing you to buy used books with writing in them.
I used to go to a shop in a student area and pick up old Norton's Anthologies. Many of the notes were unintentionally funny. Some are occasionally insightful.
As I say elsewhere, it depends on the edition or book, and how common they are.