🌲 How to Take Notes on Physical Library Books

Sometimes you have to read a physical book you can't write in. What then? Bullet Journal Pocket Editions to the rescue!

It drives my husband a little nuts that I write in my books. I don’t dog-ear them because bookmarks are great; I have a little collection of paint swatches I use when I don’t have anything else handy. But I believe that books are meant to be used, not hoarded or leveraged into decor.

To that end, I find a lot of value in thinking with my pen, although I don’t refer back to physical notes very often. The annotation process also helps when it comes time to digitize my thoughts on what I read; it helps me find the important bits again quickly. I like Papermate’s Injoy gel pens and tend to use the pink ones for writing in the margins because it stands out better on the page; green blends in to the text and doesn’t draw my eye when I circle back around to the beginning. Sometimes I underline a useful sentence, or add a symbol next to a paragraph to grab my attention later, like a ! to denote surprise or emphasis.

In an ebook, I can double-tap to highlight the line, and dictate an annotation. With a library book (or something borrowed from a friend), it’s rude to leave trail of exclamation points and arrows all over it, so the notes need somewhere else to go. I’ve discussed before how I make paper notes, and how I organize digital highlights now that AI can do some of the cleanup work. But I’ve been reading more library books lately, and I thought some folks might find it useful to discuss the evolution of my process there.

Why read dead tree books at all?

For one thing, a library is often the only reasonable way to get a book at all; academic texts can run over a hundred dollars, electronic copies don’t always exist, and there’s not much guarantee that it’ll be useful. Sometimes the physical edition is better: a chart-heavy or image-heavy book can be miserable as an ebook, even with all the advances there have been in epub formatting. It’s not always the case, of course; sometimes being able to zoom in on a map is super valuable.

Another reason is that I like modeling reading for my kids; screen-free family reading time feels different when everyone has a physical book. As I’ve written before, paper can send a better social signal than a device, and I don’t like being on electronic devices at soccer practice. I may be reading something wholesome but from a kindergartener’s perspective, even an e-reader is still a screen.

Another constraint I (counterintuitively?) appreciate is the return date. I love owning books because I love having a shelf full of things I can pull down and read whenever I want, or refer back immediately to when it unexpectedly becomes relevant. But the external deadline of needing to return a book is surprisingly handy. A purchased book can sit in my books to read pile¹ for a long time. A library book has a return date; if someone else has a hold on it, I can’t keep renewing forever. So that adds a certain pressure to actually read the book. The book therefore gets a little window of attention, which is not always what I want, but it is often what I need. (Don’t ask me how often I sing that song to my kids…)

But when I read a book I need a way to think “out loud” in a way that’s connected to the moment, and if I’m enjoying screen-free reading time, I don’t want to whip out my phone and start dictating commentary.

For a while, my solution was sticky notes. I would write a note, stick it near the passage, then type everything up after I finished. It worked, but the little squares got annoying fast. Processing the book ended with a depressing pile of used paper in the trash. I like having a physical artifact of my thinking, even if the artifact is messy, but post-its in my notebooks drive me nuts and take up space weirdly.

Use a notebook as a detachable margin

So for borrowed books, I like to use a small pocket notebook that opens in portrait mode. Lately that has been the Bullet Journal Pocket, though you may be less anal than I am about number orientation and shape than I am and therefore able to get away with a cheaper option. The vertical two-page format gives me a page that is the same size as a single A5 page, which means I don’t have that itchy “it’s not what I’m used to” feeling in terms of how many words can fit. As a bonus, it usually fits neatly inside my book like a bookmark. It easily sits in one hand or on my knee when I’m walking, too, but that’s more relevant for audiobooks (which I also use this method with, out on walks, but not as often because I generally avoid them).

Anyway, in terms of Bullet Journal methodology, what I end up doing is rapid logging, not an ornate spread. Something like this:

I also like to use my normal #articleSeed and #research style action hashtags, although obviously there’s no automatic indexing of tags when you’re writing on paper.

Anchor every thought to a page

But although there’s no automatic index, it’s important for notes to be grounded to a specific page for manual reference. For the most part, I do not bother with exact quotes; notes work better when you rephrase in your own terms and condense the point. Even if the book itself is leaving my house, each physical note still needs a locator. But I do not paraphrase everything because “re-write everything in your own words” is too time-consuming for serious knowledge work.

Generally speaking, I believe that useful notes need a distinction between claims and evidence. A claim is an idea written in my own words, while evidence is anchored to a source. With evidence, I avoid paraphrasing; I want to avoid a telephone-esque loss of meaning.

But I also don’t want to spend a ton of time taking notes while I’m still reading and absorbing the ideas, so jotting a quick, ephemeral “there’s good evidence for X on page Y” or “page X, person B did Z” note makes sense.

Process the book before you return it

Then, when I’m done reading, I can go back and take photos of the relevant pages (and my own notes) and have a computer extract and organize the information. Readwise has OCR for this, if you have an AI subscription they’re pretty good too, and I’m sure other tools exist.

Needing to return the library book on time is a nice forcing function for actually doing this. And when the reading is fresh, I remember why page 147 annoyed me or what pre-existing notes I thought the chart on page 88 might help with.

My ideal end-of-book workflow looks like this:

1. Type up my notes manually, adding commentary and enriching the thoughts now that I’m done reading and can take the time to expand.

2. Photograph the notebook pages.

3. Photograph the book pages that have exact quotes, charts, maps, images, or confusing passages I need to verify.

4. Make sure every photograph includes the page number.

5. Give the photos to an LLM and ask it to rename the photos.

6. Ask the LLM to create a clean markdown file that pairs notebook notes with quotes extracted from the relevant book-page photos.

7. Ask the LLM to create a separate, organized section that points back to the “source” notes, organized by action items like the articles I wanted to write based on what I learned.

8. Check the output, mostly relying on memory, against the photos while the book is still in my hands.

9. Return the library book once I’m confident the notes are usuable for writing the articles I’ve planned to write.

I use a prompt somewhat along these lines:

Transcribe these notebook pages. Preserve page numbers. Separate my notes from exact quotes. If a note matches up with a photographed book page, pair the note with the relevant source text or image description. Mark anything uncertain with ???. Do not invent missing page numbers. Output clean markdown grouped by page number, with a short “action items” section at the top.

LLMs are good at transcription and cleanup, and they are also perfectly capable of turning p. 119 into p. 191 just like a human could. Sometimes they “helpfully” end up merging two notes that should stay separate, or smoothing away the distinction between my thought and the author’s wording.

Still, they save a lot of time on getting a searchable first pass while my memory can still catch mistakes.

Pairing analog with digital is great

The analog and digital pieces of this workflow are complementary. The little notebook bookmark makes it easier to stay focused on the book. I don’t get interrupted by notifications, my kids don’t try to look at pictures on my phone, and I never get annoyed that I never figured out how to make an iPad whiteboard feel as natural as paper.

Then, digital cleanup integrates useful references and ideas into the rest of my knowledge base. It’s a little more work than just highlighting an ebook or PDF and extracting the annotations directly, but it’s also very satisfying in its own right, and sometimes there’s no good alternative to a physical library book for the stuff I’m trying to learn.

What do you do with library books you can’t write in? Before LLMs I honestly never bothered to type up my photos and PDF scans of handwritten notes, which I am not proud of. So I am very interested in workflows that make physical books easier to integrate into a digital note system because “I would simply always take my time and do it perfectly” is not how I am built, personally.

1. I try not to feel guilty about books I own but haven’t read; rather, they’re unread books that are available when I need something to read.