When I was growing up I was taught to take to care of books. My mother taught me at an early age that any book, either from the library or from our home bookshelf, should be taken care of. No bending it back so you break the spine. No folding over pages to use as a bookmark or two. And definitely no writing in the books. Because we went to the library the books typically belong to the library and you're not supposed to write on.
In school I was taught not to write in books. The textbooks were bought by the school system and passed out and assigned to each student. I was taught how to use paper bags from the grocery store to cover the books and then draw and write on the paper bag cover but never on the actual book. Anybody who actually wrote in the book ended up costing their family money when the school made them replace it as damaged goods.
Then I got to college. Everybody wrote in the books except the people that had to sell their books back at the end of the semester. That was the age of the copy machine and I would spend hours copying pages from my own textbooks that I had spent a lot of my parents' money on to get for class so that I could highlight and scribbl notes on the paper instead of in the book. The further I got in college the less I cared and I started writing in the books and highlighting everything that I wanted to try and remember. But it made me feel guilty and sad that I was defacing a book.
I remember when I would get a book that had folded over corners where other people had marked where they were it would offend me. I would get angry because they weren't taking care of a community resource! I would fold them back and be irritated while I read those 2 to 4 pages and then I would move on through the rest of the book.
When I got a book that had writing in it I was really upset! It distracted me from what I was reading. I would wonder why the person wrote that there. Then I would spend time trying to figure that out and trying to figure out what was so important.
E-books are awesome but there is a feature that I do not like at all. In the Kindle e-book system will show you what's been highlighted by others and how many times it's been highlighted. I turn that off! I don't usually want to know what anybody else did with the book, not in school or whatever, I want a pristine book to do what I want. But I do enjoy highlighting things in my own copies of the e-books and I enjoy making some notes on them. And sometimes actually go back and look at those highlights in months!
Recently I was in a church service where we had a guest speaker at our church. As part of his message that night he talked about how when he met a Christian he knew what kind of Christian they were from the condition of their Bible. He told a story about Christians who have Bibles in the back window of their vehicle. A story about Christians who carry a nice pretty leather Bible but the pages are not worn and there is no usage look about the book. Then he told a story about a woman that had died and he got the look in her Bible that she used. He said that she use that Bible every day. The pages were very worn. The pages had writing in the margins all throughout the Bible. And he could tell that she was a good Christian because her Bible was well-worn.
I use a Bible app on my devices to read the Bible. I do some highlighting in my Bible app. I do some notetaking in my Bible app. But for the most part you're never going to see a whole bunch of notes in the physical Bible owned by me. I guess that makes me a bad Christian in some peoples' eyes.
But I take care of books. I had several bookshelves full of paperback books that I've read over the years in the basement. One of my sons explained it to to my wife that those books were kind of like deer heads on the wall for hunters. They were my trophies showing my accomplishment to others. And to myself. Memory joggers of something fun and accomplished.
I got rid of those books. I got tired of them taking up space and gathering dust. But I took pictures of every one of the covers before I got rid of them because I like my trophies.
I don't like writing in books.
