I love books. 
When Nicholas Basbanes wrote A Gentle Madness and Patience and Fortitude, both of which are very amusing books about people who are crazy (in a bad way) about books and reading, I kept waiting for the outrageous and objectionable parts. And waiting.
The downside to being a serial-killer of hardbacks, paperbacks, rss feeds and the like is retention. It is a losing battle to recall an exact topic, quote, or concept from one of the many books I have already read this year, much less in the last thirty-seven.
After digesting the excellent book Ex Libris, by Anne Fadiman (yes, of that Fadiman family), I finally granted myself permission to earmark and annotate my own books, which helped immensely. This was a gargantuan step after the conditioning I had received at home and at school that you do not alter books in any way, and you leave them as you found them! I even had trepidation in college when I'd 'post-it' a relevant chapter as if someone would arrest me for stickie-residue.
In the last year, I gradually developed a handy process for retaining relevant facts and quotes and such that I thought I would share. I cannot vouch for it's exact legality, per se, but it's utility is quite nice.
The simple first step is that I now make a habit of earmarking book-pages with particularly interesting and relevant points. Next, when I am done with a book, I promptly and religiously create a Pages document that contains the relevant notes from that book. If the noted section is brief, I type it. If not, I simply go to Amazon and find the page in the book (Search Inside!), grab a screen capture of the relevant passage and drop it in the Pages doc.
Et Voila, essence distilled.
If I am feeling particularly productive, I'll run the screen captures through OCR so the text is searchable via Spotlight later. For me, I can generally tell within one or two books where a concept originated, but am rarely in proximity of said books, so having this distillation is very handy.
Nine times out of ten, I have already purchased the book through Amazon, so I am not defrauding them of any future revenue. Alternately, I could just drag a pen scanner across the page, but the search/capture method seems quicker in instances where the entire page is relevant.
Then, when needed, I rely on Mac OSX's Spotlight function to quickly search for text (or simply type the title of the book into spotlight) and in moments it serves me all of the particularly tasty tidbits.
Looking forward, I have been lurking around the e-book-reader websites, like those from Sony and Irex (the iLiad). I am looking forward to six or eight ounces of e-book in my briefcase holding hundreds of books (searchable, please) at my instant disposal. I'd do the same with my laptop, but battery life, heat, weight and screen contrast are the enemies of curling up near the fireplace with a cup of good tea and a new book.
How about you, dear reader? Are there any good tools or techniques that you use regularly to bookmark or peg passages that you would like to share?
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