Back in The digital reading revolution: How I like to read books, DRMed content, and the future of publishing, I outlined how I approach reading and taking notes on books (aka “studying”). I also talked about ways in which I’d like to improve my reading process. Last night I decided to take a step in that direction.

To recap, I read both analog and digital books. I prefer reading on Kindle. I buy directly from the publisher when I can, because they usually offer a PDF download bundle. When I can’t find a book in kindle format, I buy the paper copy.

Whether I’m reading on my kindle or riffling through pages, I usually read a book more than once. First I’ll read through it quickly, without stopping, even if I don’t understand parts. I bookmark those as difficult sections and move on. I don’t make many notes at this point – just a few highlights here and there to indentify the author’s assertions and supporting facts and anecdotes.

After a quick first pass, I flip back through the book and take a look at my notes. These clues help me understand the book’s important points. I reconstruct the author’s arguments by stitching together the highlighted parts. I can tell the solid arguments from the flimsy ones at a glance. The Kindle makes this sort of note-rearranging a breeze because I can import the highlights into my computer [1].

I don’t always take great notes. A lot of the time, I don’t care enough to develop a complete understanding of that particular book at that particular moment. It’s good enough to mentally index the key themes and structure of the book, and let my computer do the boring task of remembering the actual words. Then I’ve got more energy to do the fun part, the part that only I can do: unlocking the author’s secrets when the time is right.

This works great for digital books, but analog requires more work. I often have vague notions of an idea or fact that I remember reading, but can’t remember which book it came from. Sadly, I can’t google my book shelves [2]. Until now.

I’ve got a fancy Scansnap S1500M that I use to scan documents into DEVONthink. DEVONthink OCRs the documents and then proposes possible filing locations. I’d like to use DT’s powerful search on my book shelf. Yesterday I took a couple of old books to Office Depot and had them slice off the bindings. Then I scanned the books for DT to archive. I’ll save the details for another post, but the bottom line is that for $2.50 at Office Depot & 15 minutes baby-sitting the scanner, I can take any book from my bookshelf and have all of its contents instantly searchable on my laptop.

Slicing a book in order to scan it felt weird at first, but it felt great to toss the pages into the recycling bin after scanning. Books (computer books especially) are heavy and a pain to move and take up space in my house. My entire library will fit on my laptop! I can load books onto my kindle or iPad for extra portability. If I want to go old school, I can print out the pages I want to read and fold them into my back pocket. I did the same thing with a few brand new books. After scanning the pages, I stapled the chapters separately. They look and feel like digests.

I’m pretty excited about this new approach. I can highlight the paper copy more aggressively and dispose of it when I’m done. My computer holds onto the master copy and makes it searchable for me. I have some ideas of how this approach could change my reading habits, but for now I’m going to just run with it and see what happens.

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[1] On the flip side, transcribing notes by hand adds sensory experience which can improve your ability to recall information.

[2] Google Books has its shortcomings. It can’t constrain its search to my bookshelf. Deep study is difficult due to missing pages.