I am curious. How do you annotate books?

[Princess]

How do you tab and highlight?.........

[Christa]

In an online book you just press the work then drag the words you want to highlight. Then you can click on the highlight and annotate through that. For a physical copy you just highlight in your book and write on a sticky note and put it in the book.

[Lexie]

I know some people have systems to tab and annotate, but I usually underline and highlight moments that speak to me or that I feel are important and I like to right what pops in my mind in the margin! I find it easier to do it randomly like this :)

[Lacie]

I match my tabs to my cover for mostly aesthetic and I choose one for each emotion such as- sad, cute, anger, love/romance, etc then I do one more for quotes I love. once I have them picked out I put a key in the first or second page of the book where it says the title name on a blank page. I highlight to match the tab so that when I re look over the book I know what section the tab goes to. Sometimes I jot my thoughts in the margins but ive only done that 3 times. other than that that's all I do!

[˗ˏˋRowanˎˊ˗]

I like to pick out different tab sets to match the covers but I have a couple colours that stay the same:
yellow-happy/funny moments, pink/red-cute/romantic(+smut if it applies), light green/orange-confused/wtf moments, blue-sad/upset/literally crying, and dark green-notes/comments. Then I’ll pick a few other colours for book specific tabs like for Babel (R.F. Kuang) I have a tab to mark languages and one to mark racism, sexism, etc.
I’m also trying a one colour tab system for Yellowface (also R.F. Kuang) where I just note where I write or doodle :)

[Samyukta]

i don't like colouring up the books personally with highlighters, i just use a pencil for a line, a quote and i use coloured post its (tabs) for a whole scene or page

[Bea]

I usually always use the same set of tabs but sometimes I just use one color to match the cover if I have a lot left over. when I use my normal tabs this is my system:
pink- romance
blue- when i feel sorry for a character
green- important moments or moments that I like
light purple- important phrases or phrases that I like
dark purple- sad moments
orange- anger or shocking moments
yellow- funny moments

[Adam.ant]

I don't

[Vale]

that depends if you don't mind writing in the book or not bc you can

a) write with a pencil or pen and just underline, star, write literally anything that catches your attention or that you want to make sense of

b) use colored tabs or sticky notes, one of my friends rips her stick notes and write on them what she thinks of a certain paragraph or scene and uses colored tabs that mean certain things

if you're just starting out i would try the tabs first and use as many as you'd like or if your comfortable writing a pencil to erase things and its just literally up to you and what you find interesting, sad, special, horrible, its your book and your notes!

[O]

I just use one color of tabs that matches the cover and I underline with a black pen

[Shelley]

I've seen such pretty annotations on books, and I'd like to try it but I have this thing about not wanting to mark up a book. I need to get over this because some of the annotations I've seen are gorgeous, cute, beautiful...it's sort of a craft or even an art form. The last book I read, I used colored sticky notes to show where pop culture references were in the book. That's as far as I've gotten, lol.

[Shelley]

Bea wrote: "I usually always use the same set of tabs but sometimes I just use one color to match the cover if I have a lot left over. when I use my normal tabs this is my system:
pink- romance
blue- when i fe..."

This sounds like a good system.

[Shelley]

Rowan wrote: "I like to pick out different tab sets to match the covers but I have a couple colours that stay the same:
yellow-happy/funny moments, pink/red-cute/romantic(+smut if it applies), light green/orang..."

Yellowface is on my TBR. I think the whole question of who owns a story/cultural appropriation and where these topics intersect is fascinating. I also wrote a book about a literary theft (wrote 2014; published in March '23). There are times it's obvious and times it isn't so obvious.

[Norah(Taylors version)]

I just highlight lines I like and at the end tab my favorite quotes