I love reading, love books and everything about it. I have a bookcase full of books, full of books with pristine pages with no pen, pencil marks or pages with earmarks. In my school years I never made annotations or highlights in schoolbooks, I wrote all important passages down in my notebook and would then study from the notebook.
And now with web books I use post-its on pages I need to return to or I simple flip through the book till I find what I’m looking for. I always thought how easy it would be to just take a pencil a make notes for easier reference, but I just can’t make myself “damage” the book. I never really stood still about it, until today.
Today I got a new book I ordered, Everything you know about CSS is wrong. It was recently published so I want to write a review on the book. While reading the preface I already saw a sentence I wanted to take in my review and that started a stream of thought and this weblog post. I don’t want to have to take a Moleskine with the book and write down each note worthy content of the book. So I’m now debating for the first time to start making annotations in the book itself.
The book is not extremely expensive, it’s for educational purposes, considering the topic the book will be outdated in some time and will have no value whatsoever in a few years. So I think I’ll go ahead, sharpen a pencil and make tidy and readable annotations of interesting content. And while I will be taking this step the one thing I won’t do is earmark pages because that just ruins the books format. Instead I’ll just use post-its for pages I have to go back to while using the book in practice, e.g. during website development.
I did a search on Flickr to see others their books full of annotations but I didn’t find anything cool enough like Oprah’s own copies, full of colorful post-its and highlighted passages. If my copy of Everything you know about CSS is wrong turns to something I will post a photo, to mark my first book with annotations.
