.

Kindle allows you to highlight your books. I've seen some references to it also allowing you to take notes.

And I know you can do this with PDFs. It's easy to highlight whatever you want highlighted. You can also shoehorn in in-line comments in another font color--I do this sometimes on beta exchanges. And if you're doing some sort of deconstruction, you could use the font colors mindfully--something like blue for characterization, purple for world-building, green for plot, etc.

Don't know if this fits what you're trying to do, but that's what I'd try if I was doing a project like this. I'd check out the kindle options first, though. Many authors (including me) no longer give out PDFs because they're so easily pirated.

Here's the Amazon help page on bookmarks, highlights, and notes: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201829820.

I get just as much out of ebooks as I do print.

Cindyt said:

I get just as much out of ebooks as I do print.

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Me too. I use the text-to-speech screenreader functions on my ebooks. I also read via audiobooks, and there is nothing "mindless" or "passive" about it.

Nobelgia said:

You can't "markup" a digital book the same you would do a physical one (i.e with a pen and highlighter). In that case, what should I do--or are there any methods or programs I should be using to assist in achieving this?

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You absolutely can annotate them with notes, bookmark pages and highlight passages of ebooks on Kindle, iOS (iPhone and iPads) and Android tablets, as well as other ereaders like Kobo.


In most ebook systems/ereaders you can also copy brief passages to use in a note (or paper); the passages come with a citation (Author, Title, and Chapter, usually).

This works quite well. Many students use ebooks because that's the way their textbooks are published.

What is even more effective is after reading and annotating and thinking about what you've read, you sit down and write about it, even if you're writing just for yourself.

I usually use a paper notebook even when I’m reading an ebook, but I’m not sure if that’s what you mean.

Personally I resent your use of "mindlessly read" to describe my immersion in stories. I fully engage with the alternate reality of the story, experiencing the people, places, and actions as if I were there, one of the characters or a nearby invisible concerned individual. That ability to commit fully to the story takes a lot of mindfulness, of cognitive and emotional processing. It is in no ways "mindless."

Studying a story as I read it makes it an academic exercise for me rather than a vital personal experience. I see it as a failure to be fully human, rather than a disembodied brain.

It's fine if you or anyone else wants to read differently. But don't insult my way of reading.

If it weren't for ebooks I wouldn't get much reading done at all.

I wake up a lot at 3-4 am and can't sleep. I can pull my phone out and get on kindle and make a big dent in whatever book I'm reading.
I can highlight and add personal notes along the way as well. My wife can keep on sleeping as I don't have to turn a light on or make any noise!

Besides we have well over 2000 paper books and we live in a small house and we are running out of room.
My wife and I have many bookshelves double stacked, in our office, bedroom, living room, kitchen - so ebooks are the way to go from now on.

Having said that, when I buy a book on art, I prefer a real paper book for that as zooming in on photos and illustrations is rather tedious on an ebook.

Laer Carroll said:

Personally I resent your use of "mindlessly read" to describe my immersion in stories. I fully engage with the alternate reality of the story, experiencing the people, places, and actions as if I were there, one of the characters or a nearby invisible concerned individual. That ability to commit fully to the story takes a lot of mindfulness, of cognitive and emotional processing. It is in no ways "mindless."

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^^This

I do not believe the original post's intent was to offend. However words like "mindless" and "passive" are often brought up in discussions about different reading devices (paper vs ebook vs audio) and different methods of consuming literature (reading printed text in a paper book versus a person with dyslexia reading using text to speech on a kindle, a person with a VI reading using Braille, or someone reading audiobooks.) Particularly when one takes into account that some cannot read using one method or another, it can make language like "mindless" and "passive" come across as ableist, even if that was never the intent.

I don't think the intention was to offend, either. The problem comes in trying to use one word (reading) to do the work of two.

What the OP calls 'active' reading, what with the note-taking etc, is what we used to call 'studying' - you are not reading the book for the sake of the story, but analyzing it to see what you can learn about the writer's techniques. A scholarly or professional view of the work.

What the OP calls 'passive' reading is just 'reading'. Engaging with a book on a non-scholarly or professional level. (Not that you can't read with a writer's eye, noting things done well, or interestingly, but that's not the primary intent.) And, certainly you can 'engage' with something you're reading, on an intellectual or emotional level.

Reading is a blanket term, covering any and all media. Heck, 'reading' the terrain, or the ocean, is a thing.

'Passive' has negative connotations, though, especially in writer's terms, but, if someone wants money, most people would much prefer someone who passively sits and asks, rather than one who actively steals it.

Cindyt said:

I get just as much out of ebooks as I do print.

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Agreed!