I like reading and learning and I have been experimenting with different ways of making the experience more joyful and enduring. Currently, I am following a system that includes some structure that allows me to:

1. Select the book I will read next
2. Take notes while I am reading
3. Create a summary of the book
4. Remember the basic ideas

I have experimented with different techniques and tools, and I have also learnt what others use. I use them when reading business books and sometimes when reading fiction.

Select next book

I usually have more than one book in progress and I like to know what I will read next. Knowing what’s ahead grows my desire to read and makes the progress of the current book more consistent. I used to keep a list of recommended books on a text file on my laptop, but seeing the book cover adds more to “growing my desire”. I also tried keeping the list of “what’s next” on Goodreads, but I didn’t like the way the list was visualised and the mechanisms to sort it.

Currently, I use Calibre to manage my book library. It is a cross-platform open-source tool created to manage e-books. I have also added my physical books and my wish list, and I keep notes, links, ratings, and reading stats. It could make a good replacement for Goodreads. I have learnt to use cover “emblems”, small icons placed next to the covers and I use them to visualise my “reading order”. In the following picture, the number 0 means books I am currently reading, the number 1 the books that will come next, and so on until number 5. I use decimal numbers, for fine-grained sorting, but these “buckets” work for me. I currently have 56 books on my “To read” list.

Whenever I obtain a book recommendation I add it to my old text file on my laptop (I still keep it) and when I decide I will read it, I add it to Calibre. I structure my reading sequence in a way that the books “more likely” to be picked up next are at the top, but when the time to make the decision arrives, I listen to my immediate emotions not only to my structured planning. Do I prefer a novel? What’s the topic I should be learning about? What has been recently recommended? Then I select. And I make mistakes. A lot.

Taking notes while reading

I like to take notes while I am reading to remember the content and to reference it in the future. When I am reading on Kindle I highlight the parts I find interesting and when I finish the book I go through the notes to write a summary. When I use paper books I don’t write on them, so I need a different strategy.

My colleague Richard Haywood takes a post-it note and cuts it to make little tags. When reading the book he places the tags so they stick out from the pages. When he gets to the end of the book he goes through the tags and creates notes. He does it in one sitting, so he can come up with coherent notes that he can make public.

My friend Pablo Domingo uses a post-it note whenever he finds an interesting part and he creates a summary of the idea, with a drawing if possible. He places the post-it note on the page and leaves it in the book. He always reads with a pen on his hand, and I follow that advice as well.

I’ve tried the same process myself, but I prefer a coherent summary to a collection of scattered notes, and I don’t have the patience for dedicating to the notes while I am reading.

I tried to have a folded A4 paper in the book to take my notes, but what is working for me now is to use post-it notes to stick to my bookmark. When I find something interesting I write down in the post’it note the page and the idea, or the first words of the text, if I want to keep it as a quote. Sometimes I leave the notes in the book, at the end of a chapter, but I collect them all when I finish the book.

Create a summary

I borrowed the expression closing the book from Pablo Domingo. When the book is finished I like to collect my notes, create a summary, create a short review in Goodreads and archive it properly. All these things are what I call “closing the book”, and sometimes it takes me two or three hours. The most important part is the summary because that’s what I get for the future.

Richard Haywood creates his summaries with the aim that someone who has not read the book can understand them as well as himself, being able to use them for reference in the future.

I create the summaries for me. Sometimes they are no more than a collection of quotes and other times they are a very long collection of ideas, not properly condensed. I used Google Docs for my summaries but now I am using Zettlr, a Markdown editor that allows me to tag entries and link content. Sometimes I use the Zettelkasten method for my notes, as it allows me to discover relationships. I will explain it in a future article.

In the past, I liked to create my summaries as sketchnotes or mindmaps, but now I value the capacity to search them.

I started my book summaries on a medium sized ruled Moleskine.

I continued with independent sheets of paper that I was writing while I was reading and keeping them in the book.

And sometimes I created a kind of mindmap with extensive text.

I liked keeping my notes in a notebook and simplifying them as much as possible, but it takes time.

Keep it in your head

Once I finish the book, I don’t want to forget all of it, and I create flashcards. I create one or more cards for the book, with a question on one side and the answer on the other side, so I can try to remember the content in the future.

I use spaced repetition to try to recall the content. The more I know the content, the longer until I review it again. The cards I remember easily, won’t be shown until a month or more. The hard ones will be asked tomorrow. I use an application on my phone to help me with this, AnkiDroid, that I learnt thanks to Jordi Falguera. Every morning I run Anki for 10 minutes. The application selects some of my cards and shows me the title. I have to remember the content and the application asks me how good I was with the card. If it was easy for me, it won’t be shown again in a few days, but if I fail it will repeat the card in the same session and tomorrow.

This is a habit that I have stopped since the Coronavirus crisis started, I am afraid.

Reading, for me, is not only going through the pages of the book. I also enjoy taking notes and sharing what I’ve learnt.

Happy reading.

Toni Tassani — 16 May 2022

This article was originally published on 26 April 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.

2022 update

I still don’t use Anki and have also stopped using Goodreads, completely replace by Calibre.

Paper is made from wood pulp and that’s why the expression “dead tree” is used to refer to anything made out of paper, in particular books. You can even find the adjective “dead-tree” in Merriam-Webster or Collins dictionaries online. As an adjective, you can say “the dead-tree edition of that document”.

Can be a book something that is not dead trees?

Electronic books

Electronic books have been with us for a long time with different levels of fidelity and quality, from simple text files to multimedia interactive books. With Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection some publishing companies accepted e-books and dedicated devices to read have been moving more people to electronic reading.

Now, you can read the same content you have on paper using an e-book reader, a tablet or even your phone. The distribution of the pages may not be the same and if the book contains images or colour pages some details may be lost, but you can carry several books without bothering about their weight.

Some e-books are pure digital, with video or interaction options, but I want to focus on the ones that can be both digital and paper. Some books are born digital with the option to be printed, like in Lulu. Some are born pure e-book, like in Leanpub. Some e-books are free like the ones in Project Gutenberg and some can be bought in stores like Kindle, Google Play, Apple Books or eBooks.com. You can find books that were on paper and were converted to digital form in O’Reilly Learning and some books only exist in a digital medium, like Simon Wardley’s Wardley Maps [1]. To add more variety, some authors have converted their digital blog posts into printed books like Tobias Mayer’s The People’s Scrum or Michael Lopp’s Managing Humans.

Audiobooks

And there are audiobooks. An audiobook is a recording of someone reading a book to you. It can be a digital voice created via a Text-to-Speech system, the author, an actor or someone else. You have the same content as in the book, but you don’t have to use your eyes to read it. Are audiobooks books?

There are cases where audiobooks are far better than their physical pair: when you cannot use your eyes. It may be a temporal or permanent circumstance, or because you are using them while performing another activity like driving, washing dishes or walking.

A friend of mine told me he reads business books faster when he reads and, at the same time, listens to the audiobook played at high speed: it helps him to keep the focus.

Book summaries

Another phenomenon I’ve come across recently is book summaries: services that provide brief book summaries, sometimes in audio format. You can get a gist of a business book in less than 10 minutes. Blinkist and Instaread offer book summaries. They are ideal for the busy person who wants to stay up to date knowing what other people are learning. They get a view of the destination but they miss the journey. Like saying you’ve been to Paris because you’ve seen a picture of the Tour Eiffel. I would not say they have read the book.

The magic of reading

Reading requires attention and a mental effort of decoding or recognising symbols in your head. A collection of sheets of paper, the product of dead trees, become alive once you start revealing its content: when you read. There is a transformation of languages, there is a mapping from different levels of abstraction that I’ve always found magical. That process is different when you are listening.

The book as an object is another fascinating topic. I remember buying music albums, arriving home, and playing them carefully, full of attention while looking at the cover and lyrics. Once played, the album was stored with my collection and whenever I glanced over it, I was capable of listening to the music again in my head. Just having it visible on my shelf was useful for my memory.

Something similar happens to me with the books on my shelf. When I look at them I remember their content, where I bought them, what I was doing when I read them, what I felt when I was reading them, … The physical objects act as an anchor to the knowledge I got from them or the adventures I experienced when reading them. And that anchor is used every time they are in front of me. I don’t get these echos with electronic books.

Dead

You cannot ask a question to a book, electronic or on paper. You cannot start a debate. It contains an idea that was set in the past and, maybe, the author is not currently fond of it. Some critics saw the advent of websites, forums and blogs as the right replacement for books. The can be changing all the time. They can evolve as their authors’ minds.

I like that books are a snapshot in time. The idea has been disconnected from the author and you can share with others and discuss it. You can give a pointer to start the conversation.

When I read The Leprechauns of Software [2] I was puzzled by the title of the preface: “This book is a work in progress”. It is published in Leanpub, and they allow this model: the author can share as they progress and readers can support, even if the work is not complete. That book in particular looks finished, it is consistent as it is and it has not been updated since 2017. I cannot reference a page of the book because I don’t know if it will change in the future. I like the commitment that books imply.

The book as an experience

A novel, a history book, a philosophy essay, a comic book, and a business book, are very different but all of them are books. I would like to distinguish only between reading for learning and reading for leisure. When I read for leisure, I like to enjoy my time and I go through the contents and that’s it. When I read for learning, I take notes and I search for things on the internet. What I remember about the book is important to me in this case.

I’ve realised that I recall better the contents of physical books. Usually, I remember “it was on the lower part of a right page” or “about half a centimetre of pages before the end of the book”. I don’t have these cues in electronic books. I also remember the covers, the colours and the touch of the pages. I lose these with my Kindle.

It’s a very different experience to hold a pocketbook than a hardcover. A new book with the pages cracking or an old one with yellowish pages.

I have many books signed by their authors. I loved reading Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch in English) and going back and forth the pages, something I wouldn’t have experienced clicking on a link. I like to see the wrinkled spines of my books and the faded away covers. I remember I read that book on the beach, I bought that one at that airport and this one was a special gift. Books, as an object, have been a companion to me. They carry more stories than the ones written inside.

Books read

I bought my first Kindle in 2019 and, before that, I had read electronic books using an iPad. I had also read book parts on my phone. Now, I combine electronic books with dead-trees ones and I like to have one book-in-progress of each type. I can take my Kindle everywhere and I have a dictionary at my fingertip. I can start reading a book in English a few seconds after I’ve paid instead of waiting for the delivery, and it does not take any space on my bookshelf. I can choose a big font size which is helpful for my eyes and I can search for words.

I only read the paper book at home. I don’t pay attention to the “what’s better, paper or electronic books” discussion. It seems like the theatre vs. cinema one: they are different.

Audiobooks have not worked for me. I have only tried books in English and I haven’t tried in my native languages yet. Being a non-native English speaker, I tend to look up words in the dictionary and re-read whole paragraphs. When I am listening, if there is a word I don’t get, it affects my attention. The apps I have tried have to improve, with bookmarks, notes, and easy rewind.

A few years ago I tried the audiobook The Ocean at the End of the Lane read by its author, Neil Gaiman, and I enjoyed it but I was reading at the same time. Now that I have had higher exposure to English in conversations and podcasts I could try another one.

Some participants in book clubs I am in listen to the audio version (they say they “read audiobooks”) and they share a similar understanding of the content that the ones who read the words. I wish I could do more audiobooks.

The “Gutenberg parenthesis” [3] suggests that humans have been immersed in an oral culture that has been suspended 500 years since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. With the printing press, the only ideas that survived were the ones that could find the funding to be on paper. Now, with digital media, we are returning to a second “orality” based on a return to fluidity in communication.

Reading is démodé, videos are easier to consume and books do not hold the authority of knowledge. Some say that nobody likes reading but some like having read. I disagree. I will continue reading because I love it. Dead trees or not.

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Toni Tassani — 25 April 2022

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This article was originally published on 15 March 2021 on the Ocado Technology intranet.