A recent viral tweet showed the anguish of a reader who had bought a used book, only to discover that it had been annotated to high heaven. To make matters worse, the annotations didn't even make any sense. The previous owner was not underlining sentences of significance.
Source: @b0rn2pay
Is it wrong to resell a book with a bunch of annotations? It's wrong not to state that the book is in “poor condition" before you sell it. This seller said that the book in the tweet was in “good condition,” so I think the buyer had a right to feel scammed. Fellow X users pointed out that they could easily erase the annotations because they were written in pencil, but that's not the point. The point is that those pages will forever be tainted with the poor close-reading skills of a stranger. It's hard to read a book with fresh eyes when you're distracted by the scriblings of a traveler who has already been there before you.
Even re-reading your own books with your own annotations can take you out of the moment. Your eyes dart paragraphs ahead to read “the important part” that you fail to find new “important parts” that you missed the first time. It might be worth taking notes outside of your book so that it can stand alone, untainted by the reader's opinions. Even if you find that in-book annotation is your preferred method of reading, you will agree that underlining every sentence is nothing more than a waste of lead.
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