Is it ok to take notes in the margins of library books?
No, because it's rude to other readers.
No, because it can damage the book.
No, because it's never ok to take notes in the margins of books.
Yes, because I need to take notes understand what I'm reading.
Yes, because it enhances the experience for other readers.
Yes, because if it bothers other readers, they should just buy their own copy.
No (some other reason - please put tags)
Yes (some other reason - please put in tags)
I have very strong opinions on this subject, and I'm curious how others feel.
Hi, public librarian (lower case l, no degree) here, please don't.
We're already, in general, severely underfunded. Shocker, the capitalist hellscape we're stuck isn't great about allocating county budget to such a socialist outlet.
When you write in the margins, that's considered damage, and we just do not have the funding to replace every book we have to weed for damage.
Use sticky notes. Please. Write your margin notes on sticky notes in the book. You can even keep your place that way. But please please please don't write in the books, don't crack the spines, and don't dog ear them. That's just going to force us to weed them, and we can't always replace them.
#we flip through every book that comes in the drop off to see if the pages are loose torn damaged or written on #and we're supposed to set aside all of those for checking by collections #to see if its severe enough to warrant weeding #and frankly as the budget gets tighter i know im not the only one turning a blind eye to some damage #because i know we wouldnt be able to replace it anyway #better to let it slide til it gets worse #but its a serious problem
Hi, capital L Librarian here, if you think your notes enhance other readers' experience of the book 1) you're wrong and 2) no one's going to get to read them anyway because you damaged the book and we had to throw it away.
Good job breaking it, hero.
Also capital L Librarian here: do not write in the books. do not highlight the books. do not cross out the swear words. do not mark in the book! If you do, we remove the book. It's been damaged. And damaged books are removed from our collection, usually to the trash can. And replacing books with intentional damage eats into our already tight budgets!
I see some people in the notes complaining that the problem is Evil Librarian Weeding, so let me give you some extra context, as another capital-L librarian:
Yes, we get rid of books that have been extensively written in. (Most of us will try to rescue them with ink and whiteout and glue and desperation, but that only works with small amounts of writing, like when a kid puts their name in the front cover because they haven't yet learned they shouldn't with books they don't own.) There are a lot of good reasons for this and absolutely none of them are "being snobby" or "purist":
A) Book annotation can be misleading. Okay, sure, you're hopefully making good annotations, but can you be sure? Even more important, if YOU can annotate the book, so can everyone else. Librarians don't have the time to not only flip through every book with writing but also read every annotation to prevent people from putting blatantly incorrect information in there. Some people are conspiracy theorists; some people are bad actors; and some people mean well but are legitimately just wrong. We have to get rid of the book because we can't guarantee it's quality is what it says on the back anymore, either in content or physical form.
2) Book annotation can be abusive. Please imagine that in addition to you making your happy thoughtful annotations in your book, the Worst Person You've Ever Heard Of is also doing that. Imagine what the inside of, say, a book about the Holocaust would look like if people like this were allowed to write in it and we kept putting it back out there. Can you imagine what books about trans people would look like? Books about disabled justice? Gay romance novels? Stories about abolition? We also don't have time to read every annotation to make sure it isn't vile, and that means we have to get rid of books with writing in them to make sure we don't accidentally expose our patrons to hate speech at their public library. It's one thing to read about the horrors of the Holocaust, and another entirely to see pro-Nazi annotations from random people in your community.
3) Book annotations are visibly rejected by most patrons. Yeah, I know someone out there is going to respond with "excuse you I only annotate in full medieval illumination, my copy of The Devil Wears Prada looks like the Book of Kells," but no one does that and, surprisingly, it doesn't matter. Nothing makes a patron decide NOT to take a book like flipping through it and seeing handwriting; i have put things back at the checkout finish line for this frequently. Lots of patrons instantly just turn it in to us and tell us it's damaged, because most of the time they also do not have time to read a bunch of unasked-for annotations to see if they'll enhance or detract from their reading experience. Many get mad, because they're used to picking up pristine book copies for sale and get actively angry we have grottier books people have been writing in. And even if they aren't opposed to the idea, it still turns a lot of readers off simply because it's messy looking. Writing in the margins creates visual clutter. You may LIKE visual clutter, which is great, but most people trying to read the newest Steel or learn about the Civil War before their test next week probably do not. More often than not, the attempt to engage with another reader via marginalia actually drives them away, and they never read it.
4) Book annotation does damage the book. It's the nature of books to be a mostly temporary medium; paper degrades or gets eaten by bugs, glue dries and rots, bindings break, etc, and any foreign element you add hastens that. Ink on pages makes them more fragile, which makes them tear earlier and more often; graphite from pencils gets ground into the paper permanently and starts blotting out the whole page after a while; dog ears simply fall off. An annotated book doesn't live as long as an unannotated one, and since we have negative money to be buying new books when we don't have to, we try very hard to protect them. (Note this doesn't matter for your home collection; your books will probably live about the same amount of time unless they're being handled 50 times a day like ours.)
If it helps, you can think of it like a comment section. If anyone can say anything, you need mods to be on constant duty reading every line of text, which translates into zillions of worker hours no one has even if our (usually government or nonprofit so not rolling in the dollars) funding wanted to pay for it. And since we don't have that and will never have it, and these are physical objects so that process can't be automated, we have to do the responsible thing as a profession: disallow comments entirely.
Ironically, most libraries actively seek patron comments in the form of reviews and recommendations to others, which we often post online or on bulletin boards. We love it when readers tell each other their thoughts and encourage each other to read. But the inside of a book no one will ever see unless they already wanted to read it anyway is not the place for that.
(For what it's worth, I love the idea of shared marginalia, of thoughts added to thoughts by people connected to one another. I do them in my own books. But that's the sort of thing you should do with your OWN books, whether you leave them in a public place for a stranger or loan them to your friends or whatever. Library books are a public resource and they have to be accessible to everyone, and marking them up actively prevents them from being used that way.)
