In the past couple of weeks, I’ve posted screenshots of my school books stored in the cloud. It’s nice to have access to hundreds of pounds of paper books on a phone, e-reader device like a Kindle, and computer with internet access…but what I rely on the most is something that may seem like a support for the lazy! It’s the ability to easily search (using the “find” feature) and quickly see all of my highlights and personal notes.

Here’s a screenshot of some of my notes and marks. I rarely re-read an entire text–instead I page through a book and look for my marginal notes and highlights.

Using e-text, I don’t bother to page through at all–I simply click on the summary of my notes and marks. Occasionally it’s a sign of laziness (like when I can’t be bothered to re-read a book before book club) but usually it’s a “work smarter not harder” move (like when I have a group discussion for a graduate class and I need to know the quotes the professor is going to bring up).

Interestingly, the professor of the graduate literature class I took last year banned all digital books from the classroom…I had to spend hours transcribing all my digital notes into a paper book the night before each class. Why not skip the digital books for that class? Well,  when I wrote my weekly papers, I needed to have my quotes in digital format to drop into the essays…so where this is going? <sigh> We have a long way to go, folks.