I just exchanged a message with Victor that led me to think about
marking books.
I noticed that Victor had annotated in the front cover of one of his
books a the page number of a passage about code reading which was really
cool as I was able to jump straight there. I _never_ write in books. I
think I had a bad experience as a child so I just can't bring myself to
write in one, whereas I know if it was, say, on the web, I would
annotate it straight away.
Then, I started thinking that the O'Rielly books all come with an errata
page on their site, so a good start would be to annotate all the errata
in the book in the margins. You might save yourself some head scratching
later and what's more, it could benefit a future reader.
Victor also said that a book would be more valuable if it was annotated
by his smart friends which made me ponder and appreciate the benefits of
marking up a book..
..anyway enough random thoughts for today
I think I may have had a similar bad experience as a child, because I never used to write in books, either. I used to be almost religious about it, but that has gradually changed over the years.
These days, I don't write in books often (particularly if I plan to loan them to people or otherwise share them), but I will highlight relevant sections of text and make notes in the margins of books that I know only I will ever use. I don't know how of why it eventually became something I could bring myself to accept, but it did.
Once I do write in a book, however, that seems to make it unacceptable--in my mind, anyway--to later sell that book at an auction or give it away to a book fair or something. I guess it's kind of a privacy issue. Just as I don't want someone searching through my old hard disks for data, I am not really comfortable with the idea of someone reading one of my old books, noticing what I thought was interesting, wrong, or whatever.
Posted by: Sako at January 30, 2003 02:28 PM