How to Take Notes on a Book: What to Write Down, With an Example

Taking notes on a book works best in two stages. While you read, mark lightly: a line in the margin, or a "?" beside anything you doubt. At the end of each chapter, close the book and write a few lines in a notebook: the main point in your own words, a short quote or two with page numbers, your reaction and any question the chapter left you with. When you finish the book, write a one-page summary, and keep an index at the front so you can find any of it again months later.

This is for books you read on your own time, like a biography you want to remember or next month's book club novel. Studying a textbook for an exam is a different job (our guide to taking better notes has a short version). We make Ophaya smart pens, but everything here works with a pencil and a cheap notebook.

Taking notes on a book: in the margins or in a notebook?

Margin notes are quick, and you see them again every time you open the book. Mortimer Adler argued in his 1941 essay "How to Mark a Book" that full ownership of a book comes from writing in it. The trouble is room. A margin holds a word or two, and what you wrote stays in that one copy, which is no help once you've lent it to a friend.

A notebook has room for whole sentences and works with books you can't write in, but it loses the link to the text unless you write down page numbers. For books you own, we'd do both: light marks in the book while you read, and the real writing in the notebook after each chapter. Use pencil if you might sell the book later.

What is worth writing down

Copy quotes, but keep them short and write the page number every time. Put them in quotation marks, because next year you'll want to know which words were the author's and which were yours. For anything longer than a sentence or two, write the first few words and the page range.

Your reaction is the easiest part to skip. You can always get the author's argument from the book again, but "I don't buy this, she assumes everyone has a steady paycheck" exists only in your notebook. Write down where you agreed and where you pushed back, plus any question the chapter raised, like a word to look up or a claim you want to check.

Then close the book and write the chapter in two or three sentences. If you can't do it without peeking, skim the chapter again before moving on. At the end of the book, do the same on one page: what it argues or what happens, the ideas or scenes you expect to keep, the quotes worth copying, and who you'd lend it to.

Two habits waste the effort. Underlining half of every page tells you a passage caught your eye but not why, so add a word beside the line ("example," "disagree," "see p. 40"). Notes without page numbers leave you paging through 300 pages for one sentence.

An example: notes on one chapter

Here is a notebook entry for chapter 5 of a made-up book about personal finance. Everything in it is invented except the format. It opens with one line: "Ch. 5, Pay yourself first, pp. 88 to 112, read Oct 3."

That's half a page. When you come back to it, the "!" and "?" lines are the ones worth rereading, and the page numbers take you straight to the passage. For fixed page layouts, see our guide to note taking methods.

Keep a key and an index at the front

Use the same few symbols in every book and list them inside the front cover. We'd use a vertical line for an important passage, a star for a quote worth copying, "?" for doubt and "!" for surprise or disagreement. Four or five is enough, since a dozen turns into a code you'd have to decipher next year.

The index goes on the blank pages at the front or back. As you read, add a topic or a name with its page, like "parents and money: 12, 47, 103." Adler used the end-papers at the back of his books for "a personal index" of the author's points in order.

Fiction and nonfiction need different notes

Nonfiction notes follow the argument. For each chapter, write down the claim and the evidence, and say if it convinced you. Practical books get one more line: what you'll try.

Novels rarely need chapter-by-chapter summaries, and a line per chapter is plenty if you want any at all. Spend the notes on a character list with the page where each person first appears and on guesses about where the story is going. "I think the brother knew, p. 140" is fun to check at the end.

Library books and ebooks

Don't write in a library book, and skip the sticky notes. The University of Kansas Libraries' care and handling guidelines ask readers to take notes instead of underlining or writing in the margins, and not to use Post-it notes, which the American Museum of Natural History's library says leave adhesive residue. Use slips of scrap paper as bookmarks, with a word and the page number on each, and copy them into your notebook before the book goes back.

The Kindle app lets you mark passages and take notes, and its My Notebook view collects your notes in one place. Libby, the library ebook app, can export your notes and bookmarks for a title as a spreadsheet or a web page, even after you've returned it. Marking is so easy in these apps that you can finish a book with 200 marked passages you never open again. Write the chapter notes and the summary yourself anyway, and add chapter numbers, which also work in a friend's paper copy.

How to find a note again months later

Reading notes usually go missing because they're spread out, some in margins and some on a slip inside a book that went back to the library. Keep one reading notebook for every book, and start each entry with the title, author, chapter and date. Number the pages and use the first page as a contents list, one line per book.

The back of the notebook can hold an index across books. If "habits" comes up in three different books, one line with three page numbers puts them side by side. Use the same word for the same topic every time, or the index splits in two.

Paper falls short on search. You can type each one-page summary into a single document, or photograph and convert the pages (our guide to converting handwriting to text compares the options).

We make the Ophaya smart pen for readers who want to keep writing on paper. It writes in ink and has an infrared camera that reads a printed dot pattern, so it captures pages written in Ophaya dot-code notebooks, like the ones in the Smart Pen + 5 Notebooks set. Ordinary paper, including your book's margins, gets the ink but no digital copy. Pages sync over Bluetooth to the free Ophaya Pro+ app on iPhone, iPad or Android, where you can tag notes (the book's title makes a good tag) and search your notes by keyword. OCR converts the handwriting to editable text, but check any quote or page number it gives you before pasting it elsewhere.

Frequently asked questions

How do you take notes while reading a book without losing the thread?

Make a quick mark and keep reading. At the end of the chapter, go back to the marks and write your notes.

Do I need to take notes on every book?

A thriller you read on a plane can go without. Save the full method for books you want to remember or talk about, and give the rest a two-line entry in the notebook.

How long should reading notes be?

About half a page per chapter and one page for the whole book. If yours run much longer, you're probably copying the book instead of reacting to it.

How do you take notes for a book club?

Do the usual chapter notes, then add two or three questions for the group, each with a page number so you can read the passage aloud when it comes up.