Transformative Reading ... 2017 Edition?!

So I found this list of books I read and which I wanted to put on this blog in my inbox. It’s from a migration from OmniFocus to Emacs/org-mode from 2019, and the title is “Transformative Reading 2017”. What were the picks back then? And being 7 (!) years wiser, what do I think about the picks now? Here’s the list. I don’t know why I originally ordered them this way, but I left it as-is.

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11 or so Android Ebook Reader Apps for Academic Writing Workflows: Annotations are Hard

Here’s my personal comparison of Android ebook readers for my Boox eink tablet. I would love to add drawings as annotations. Ratta Supernote devices do this splendidly by storing the pencil input directly, without handwriting recognition. (Example here.) This is the gold standard. Everything else requires multiple apps (to draw a diagram, for example) and import/export (of notes or EPUB book locations), which is also acceptable, but not ideal.

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Boox NeoReader Annotation Export Is Meh

When you use the built-in “NeoReader” on a Boox tablet, you get the best pencil input and quite good highlighting and annotation support. If you don’t have a Onyx Boox eink tablet with that app installed, don’t bother looking for it on the Android/Google Play Store – that app is not available anywhere else, it seems. And the app of the same name on the Play Store is a QR Code Reader.

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Reading Habits: Putting It All Together

This post has moved to Zettelkasten.de. Read it there.

I am moving next month, and so I though about getting rid of stuff in my life. There are lots of books I’ve read, but from which I never processed all the notes. I know for sure that at I finished least one book in the collection about two years ago! You see, I was, and still am, vulnerable to the Collector’s Fallacy. While I try to get through the pile of books, I reviewed my reading process. This is a summary where I put together some of the topics I already wrote about

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Note-Taking when Reading the Web and RSS

This post has moved to Zettelkasten.de. Read it there.

In the last post, I detailed that collecting texts may become a tempting replacement for obtaining real knowledge, but also that collecting in itself doesn’t get us anywhere. I called this the “Collector’s Fallacy”. I think we need to conquer this lazy, stuff-hoarding part of ourselves with good knowledge management habits.

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The Collector’s Fallacy

This post has moved to Zettelkasten.de. Read it there.

There’s a tendency in all of us to gather useful stuff and feel good about it. To collect is a reward in itself. As knowledge workers, we’re inclined to look for the next groundbreaking thought, for intellectual stimulation: we pile up promising books and articles, and we store half the internet as bookmarks, just so we get the feeling of being on the cutting edge.

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Manage Citations for a Zettelkasten

This post has moved to Zettelkasten.de. Read it there.

Today, we’ll talk about tools for a change. Managing a reference file is part of the collection phase of maintaining a Zettelkasten. It’s of special importance if you’re writing a research paper or a book because without proper citation management things are going to be a mess for you, soon. I’ll show you how I do it and tell you about possible alternatives briefly.

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Making Proper Marks in Books

This post has moved to Zettelkasten.de. Read it there.

Highlighting texts

My reading workflow consists of phases similar to the phases in GTD: collect, process, write. This post is about collecting.

Marks aid understanding – but don’t overdo it

When you read a book, do you underline words or sentences or whole paragraphs? Do you use a colored text highlighter, a ballpoint pen or a pencil?

Manfred Kuehn thinks the way you treat a book is a sign of how civilized a reader you are. If you paint the pages you don’t know a lot about getting information and treating books. Also, underlining is utterly useless in most cases: you don’t magically remember the content better if you underline it word for word, sentence by sentence. Underlining won’t help you remember; marks are there to aid understanding in a later phase of reading.

Despite Kuehn’s point, you’re not supposed to consider yourself a caveman just because you use colored pens to put marks in texts: Umberto Eco states in How to Write a Dissertation1 that you should use different colors for different questions, topics, points of view, and he says you should mark passages in color for revisiting the text.160 According to Eco, it’s useful to color-code your marks and reflect this code in your notes.

I agree that you should neither ruin other people’s property nor their reading experience of library books by painting the book’s pages, though. That’s just ruthless. But you’ll need to mark passages for further reference, else you’ll forget what you found important in the first place. So because you have to, use a pencil and erase your marks later if the book wasn’t yours. If you’re going to re-read the text and use it during future research, buy the book and use colored pencils if you like.

When I read, I collect everything that’s useful on paper. I practice ‘writing while reading’, if you like. Writing improves thinking, remember?

My collection phase consists of both putting marks in the margins and writing notes:

  1. I put pencil marks in both my own and library books. Nowadays, I simple put a dot • in the page margin to find the passage I want to pick up later. These little visual guides ease scanning the page.
  2. The text inspired a thought, and the inspiring part is already marked in the text. I only need to capture the thought during the collection phase. I used to write notes in the margins to remember what I had thought in re-reads of the book. Now, though, I write a summary or a unique thought on separate pieces of paper which I can physically pull out of the text.

Both the mark and the note will be useful when I process the text later. True understanding depends upon elaborate notes which I put into my Zettelkasten. I’ll expand the processing phase in another post.

Getting Fancy with Marks

For academic reading, I employ a tactic which is slightly more complex. My good friend Sascha suggested to divide text into its functionings:

  • I circle terms which are being defined and write a D for Definition in the margin.
  • When the author elaborates a model, I put an M or μ in the margin and maybe highlight key terms she uses.
  • If I spot an argument, I put an A or α in the margin and sometimes draw a vertical line in the margin to designate the passage.
  • Everytime I find a weakness in the argument or disagree due to a different starting point, I put a bolt glyph in the margin.

These glyphs I only use for texts in philosophy and sociology which tend to be more complex and need to be broken down into manageable parts. In nearly every other fiction and non-fiction book it’ll suffice to take note and aid the eye with unobstrusive marks.

Please tell me more about your own reading habits!

  1. I couldn’t find an English translation of Eco’s Come si fa una tesi di laurea. The German translation (affiliate link) is very popular, though. I cite this one.