Yes I mark mine up, surprised so many here don’t. I used to be a person that never did, but heard some people on podcasts highly recommend it, and I also began wanting to take notes. I think it adds value to the book on a re-read if you do it cleanly. I underline the first and last word of the highlight, with a curly bracket in the margin to indicate the area (sometimes a comment added), and a small plus sign in the top right corner to indicate which pages are noted. Then I can flip through when finished and dictate the notes to my computer. But they also make sticky tabs for page notes if you don’t wanna mark books up. I do have some visual or big coffee table books, like Poor Charlie’s Almanack, that I don’t want to mark up inside.

Oh hell no.

I was brought up with the concept of books being the secular equivalent of sacred. I still cringe at the idea of anyone ever throwing them away - and notes/underlines/doodles/dogears/etc still feel like unspeakable vandalism to me.

That’s not really a defensible attitude - books are just tools, physical books are just printouts of the text, terrible books don’t deserve space in my home, and there’s something unpleasantly religious about treating them as untouchable.

But the conditioning goes deep, and it’s hard to unwire.

I read ebooks 90% of the time now, rendering the question mostly moot - but my eyelid still twitches when I see someone hold a book folded back on itself.

I always want to, but I just can’t stand to see the clean book merged with my shitty handwriting

If it’s my own book then yes – I’ll underline and make notes (but always with pencils, never pens!)

I also use dog ears, that’s just how I roll!

The first thing my brother does when he buys a book is cracks the spine 🤢

Haha, it used to bother me but now I’ve started just using my books, there’s not really any sense in trying to keep them in perfect condition, I’d rather be able to throw it into a backpack and read it on a beach 🙂

No way, books are sacred. I stopped dog earing them when I was 15.