After taking note of Jill Davis‘ copy of What the Dormouse Said, I thought I should show what my copy looks like now:

My standard practice now is to attach a bunch of Post-Its of various sizes to the back cover of a book that I think I’m going to read carefully, so they’ll be easy to hand. With a good book– or one I have serious arguments with– I’ll use up with a few dozen stickies.

For purposes of comparison, here’s my copy of William Mitchell’s Me++: The Extended Self in the Networked City:

This is, I admit, the reading equivalent of strip-mining: it’s an exercise in extracting the meaning from a book, and leaving behind an artifact that’s virtually unusable for others. Yes, the words are all still there, so in one sense nothing’s been “extracted;” yet it’s almost always more distracting than enlightening to try to read through someone else’s comments, and so in that sense heavy markup makes it harder for a new reader to (depending on your favorite flavor of literary theory) engage with the original text, or make their own sense of a book.

Though occasionally it can be an interesting experience: in the Stanford Library I once found a copy of William Jackson Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” that had been read, and annotated, by a couple generations of students, including at least one who was the grandson of one president Turner mentions.

[To the tune of Double, “U (“Astro Base” Remix),” from the album “Gee(Gts) Presents Greatest Remix”.]

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