Let’s Talk Bookish – To Annotate or Not to Annotate

Aria @ Book Nook Bits will be the new host for Let’s Talk Bookish! If you aren’t following her yet, good check out her blog and give her a follow!

APRIL 29: TO ANNOTATE OR NOT TO ANNOTATE… (ARIA @ BOOK NOOK BITS)

Prompts: …that is the question*. Do you like annotating books? If so, how do you annotate them? Is there a difference for you between ebooks, physical books, and audiobooks? If you’ve ever had to annotate books in school, does this affect your willingness to annotate the books you read for fun? What are some downsides to annotating books in your opinion?

Welcome back to another week of LTB here at DTRH! Actually last week in my exam haze I totally posted the “wrong” topic…! Luckily, this is a free week, so I shall use it to catch up on last week’s topic proper. Sorry about that!

Honestly, I refuse to annotate by doing anything permanent to any book. Even my textbooks, which I know are often annotated, remain completely blank. Something about re-sale value? Though I don’t even usually re-sell all my used books. I guess I was taught (by who…?) never to mark a book, and so I can’t even bring myself to dog-ear them or honestly even write in pencil.

No judgment against those who do though. If it’s your own book, feel free to mark it up however you’d like! In fact, I think there is definitely some charm in seeing notes in a second-hand book. After all, you get a glimpse into what someone else thought about the book, and it also makes you think about whether you agree with what the previous person has chosen to annotate.

I wouldn’t mind marking up an e-book though. As long as it’s erasable, I’d be okay with it. That being said though, if I do make notes, I usually make them on a separate piece of paper rather than writing into the book. After all, if I want to find that note later, it would be more trouble to look through the book and find my note than to have a separate piece of paper pointing to the page number and line I wanted to annotate. As for audiobooks…how does one annotate an audiobook? If you know, please let me know in the comments down below.

I still don’t want to annotate my books even for class. I see the people around me doing it now, but I still can’t bring myself to do it for some reason. I can’t even really think of the reason why, I think it’s just ingrained into me. I imagine that people who annotate their textbooks, etc., are more willing to annotate the books they read too (please let me know if this applies to you!), but I actually have no idea. I think for me, I always want to have the book in a condition where I can share it with someone else, free of my own ideas.

I suppose that’s a bit contradictory, to find it charming that I can read someone else’s thoughts if the book is marked up, yet not want to mark it up myself for the exact opposite reason of not wanting to affect someone else’s reading. I wonder if one way of thinking or the other is actually more dominant in our community…

All in all though, please keep your books in good condition and free of markings if it’s someone else’s book! The number of times I’ve gotten my book back in…horrendous conditions from lending it out…I’m sure many of you can relate. Why do people do that?! I will never know.

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