Showing posts with label book. Show all posts
Showing posts with label book. Show all posts

How to Read a Book

Mike's Notes

This is great advice. I'm going to do this. Also, using commonplace books is a great suggestion. Thanks, Hana 😎

"A commonplace book is a personal notebook where a reader copies passages and questions from everything they read. Keeping one lets us carry questions from one book to the next." - Hana Lee Goldin

Card Catalog is a fantastic gem of a newsletter from Hana.

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10/10/2026

How to Read a Book

By: Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS
Card Catalog: 30/09/2026

Hana Lee Goldin, MLIS: Your personal librarian for the AI age. Forever in the pursuit of exploring how we find, filter, and feel about information.

...

Quick summary

Reading a nonfiction book as more than its chapters changes what the book can give us. The pages around the chapters tell us how its argument is built, when it was written, who made it, and which conversation it joins. With that context in hand, every chapter carries more meaning.

Key takeaways

  • Reading the table of contents before chapter one lets us follow the argument as it builds, step by step.
  • Our own marks in the margins and a running note on the phone turn the book into a conversation we can return to.
  • The notes and the bibliography hand us our next book, chosen by someone who spent years in the field.

Cracking open a new nonfiction book is one of the finest adventures a mind can go on. It’s portable and immediate, asking for almost nothing but curiosity, and not just a willingness to give sustained attention to one subject but a deep, abiding welcome of the attention itself. The book becomes both mentor and sparring partner all at once. For a little while, its subject occupies our thoughts, in the most delightful way. We dive deep into some niche and come up with our minds fuller, fed by the richest kind of mental nourishment.

There’s far more to a nonfiction book than its chapters, though. Most of us turn to chapter one, where the writing we came for begins. The pages at the front and back are less familiar and can look like formalities, so they tend to stay unread.

The pages we pass over carry records left by the people who made the book. A finished book passes through many hands, from an editor who pushes back on its logic to a designer who arranges its pages. Several of those hands leave a mark we can read. The publisher dates the book and names itself on the copyright page. A cataloger, who read the book before it reached a shelf, wrote the short block of catalog information printed on that same page. Behind the last chapter, the author’s own notes and acknowledgments sit next to an index, which an indexer built by combing every page for what a later reader might want to find.

Read alongside the chapters, those pages give a book a place in time and a circle of company that the chapters alone can’t. With the table of contents in mind, we walk into each chapter knowing what the author is trying to prove and how far along the argument we’ve come. A year on the copyright page lets us hear the book as a voice from its own moment, one whose claims carry a date and whose confidence we can weigh against everything learned since. The notes and bibliography introduce us to the company the author kept, the writers the author argued with and admired, and turn a single voice into a conversation we’re invited to join. An index lets us come back long after and find the passage that stayed with us, keeping the book ours past the last page.

In 1940, the philosopher Mortimer Adler published How to Read a Book, later revised with the editor Charles Van Doren. Adler taught readers to survey a book’s structure before reading it closely. A librarian begins there too, then asks different questions. Who made this book? What work does its argument rest on? Where does it sit among the other books on its subject?

Every book we read has a life with us that runs longer than the reading. It starts in a bookshop aisle or a library app, with a title that catches our eye, and can carry on for years after the last page, in a passage we return to or a book it led us toward. The pages around the chapters travel that whole distance with us. They do the most for us when we know which ones to reach for as we go, beginning with the moment we first pick a book up.

Before we start

We can learn a lot about a nonfiction book before reading any of it. With the book in hand, a few pages at the front and back answer two questions. The first is whether the book covers what we want to learn, and in how much depth. The second is what kind of reading we’re in for, from how recent the research is to how the argument is laid out. Answering those questions before chapter one means we start the book knowing what it can give us. On the next nonfiction book we pick up, these are the places to look:

  • Check the year on the copyright page against how quickly the subject has changed.
  • Look for an edition number on the copyright page. A second or later edition often opens with a new preface on what the author changed.
  • Turn to the page about the author and the acknowledgments to see who trained the author and who funded the work.
  • Scan the subject headings in the cataloging block on the copyright page, if the book has one. A heading the cover never mentions may point to a subject the book takes on and the marketing set aside.
  • Read the chapter titles straight through, in order, before chapter one.
  • Read the last paragraphs of the introduction, where authors often preview each chapter.
  • Glance at the final pages of the last chapter, where the conclusion often states the whole case.
  • Look up the one topic we came for in the index at the back. A lone page number may mean the book barely covers the subject. Many page numbers, broken into subentries, usually mean the book covers it in depth.

Glancing at these pages answers the questions we brought to the book. A slower look turns up more: how an argument changed across editions, what the book’s subject headings reveal, and where the author places their work among other writers. The first page to turn to sits behind the title page, where the copyright page records when the book came out and who published it.

The copyright page

  • What it is: The publisher prints this page on the back of the title page to record who owns the book’s rights and when it came out.
  • What it’s for: It names the house that produced the book and gives the year of publication, our starting point for asking how current the research is and how the book reached print.
  • What it gives us: We can read each claim alongside the year it was made and notice which parts of the book newer work may have revised.

The copyright page sits on the back of the title page. Publishers use that page to record who owns the rights to the book and the year it was first published. The year is the line to read first, because it tells us when the book entered the conversation. A study of public health from decades ago can still be brilliant, though its statistics describe a world that has since moved on. With that year in mind, we can read the book as a report from its own moment, written by someone who could only know what was knowable then. The year tells us which claims may need checking against newer work before we repeat them. How much the year changes our reading depends on the field. Thirty years may matter less to a history of ancient Rome, where the central evidence often changes more slowly than it does in nutrition or computing.

A printing is a new batch of the same text; an edition changes the text itself. Many books show their printing history as a row of numbers, sometimes descending: 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. Printers call it a number line. Publishing conventions vary, but the lowest number still standing usually identifies the printing in our hands. A row whittled down to 7 means six earlier batches of the same edition were printed before ours. New editions often arrive with a new preface, where authors explain what they changed and why. Reading that preface first shows us where the argument shifted before we commit to the rest.

The publisher’s name on this page gives us one clue about how the book reached print. University presses often publish scholarly work and commonly send manuscripts to outside specialists for review before publication. Trade publishers usually publish for a general readership, with editors working closely on a book’s structure, clarity, and pace. Both kinds of publisher may seek expert advice, copyedit closely, or leave much of the factual checking to the author. Neither name guarantees accuracy. It tells us where to begin asking how the book was made, and how much checking we may need to do ourselves.

Besides the publisher, the person to get to know before we begin reading is whoever wrote the book. A page near the front or back gives the author’s training and earlier work. That tells us what they bring to the subject, whether a historian coming to a scientific question or a journalist who spent years inside an industry. The acknowledgments say more still, this time in the author’s own voice. They often name the people who read early drafts and the institutions that supported the research. Those names place the author inside a community of colleagues and mentors and show us the conversation the book grew out of. A history written from inside one school of thought, or a book funded by the industry it describes, can still be excellent. Reading the acknowledgments first tells us which community and point of view the book comes from. With that in mind, we can follow the author's arguments knowing the perspective behind them.

The cataloging block

  • What it is: The cataloging block is a short catalog record printed on the copyright page, listing the book’s subject headings and shelf numbers.
  • What it’s for: It gives libraries a standard way to describe the book and place it beside others on related subjects.
  • What it gives us: Its subject headings show what the book substantially covers and give us a route to other books on the same subject.

The copyright page carries a second kind of entry, this one from a library rather than a publisher. On many books it appears as a boxed cluster of text lower on the page. Librarians call it the cataloging block, a catalog record printed inside the book itself. Its subject headings name the topics the book covers. Libraries use shared terms so books on one subject gather under the same heading instead of scattering across near synonyms. The classification numbers beneath them place the book on a shelf beside related work.

Not every book carries a cataloging block. When one does, its headings are still human choices, made inside an institution with its own history. Libraries revise their terms as language and understanding change, though the printed record stays as it was.

Reading the subject headings before chapter one shows us how a cataloger summarized the book in a handful of phrases. A history of a revolution might carry one heading for the war and another for the women of that era. That second heading tells us that women’s lives are substantial enough to the book for the cataloger to name them as a subject. When the headings line up with what the cover promises, the marketing has described the book fairly. When they name a subject the cover leaves out, we have found something the marketing set aside.

Each subject heading can be searched in a library catalog, including WorldCat. Search one, and the catalog gathers other books described with the same terms. The classification number can do the same work in a physical library: nearby numbers lead us toward books on related subjects. A cataloging block turns one book into a route through a shelf.

The table of contents and the introduction

  • What it is: The contents page lists the chapters in order. The introduction often states the thesis and may preview what each chapter will do.
  • What it’s for: Together they show the author’s plan before the argument begins.
  • What it gives us: We meet each chapter knowing what work it is meant to do, which keeps the argument in view even in a long or difficult book.

Once a book has passed the checks on its copyright page and its cataloging block, the next pages show how its argument is built. The table of contents is the place to begin, since chapter titles read in order lay out the author’s case the way an outline lays out an essay. Mortimer Adler called this kind of survey inspectional reading: a look at a book’s structure before we read it closely. Reading the titles first hands us the author’s plan before we reach the argument itself.

The author’s plan, read off the chapter titles, lets us guess the argument before we’ve read a page. Picture a history whose chapters begin with a single town and end with the decisions of a distant capital. The sequence may suggest that the author sees local events as an explanation for national ones. Carrying that guess in our heads as we read turns every chapter into a small test of whether the author delivers. When the book surprises us, we feel the surprise. That feeling marks the place where the book changed our mind.

A contents page also shows proportion, which the text itself never announces. Page numbers beside each chapter reveal where the author spent the most space, often on the part of the case that needed the most defending. Books divided into larger parts offer another clue: their part titles show the argument’s main turns, with the chapters beneath them doing the work.

Authors of nonfiction often use the introduction to state their thesis outright and to name the scholars they’re arguing with, which turns a book that looked like a monologue into one side of a debate. Many introductions close with a preview of each chapter, which lets us check our reading of the contents against the author’s own summary. Adler also recommended glancing at the final pages before starting, because authors tend to restate the case there in its finished form. With the introduction and those closing pages read, we enter the text knowing where it begins and where it means to arrive, which frees us to watch how the author gets there.


Photo by Elijah Crouch on Unsplash

While we’re reading

Even with the argument in view, attention tends to drift somewhere in the middle of a book. One cause is that we’ve only been receiving for a stretch, not responding. Our focus returns the moment we answer back. A mark in the margin or a question in a note keeps the author’s claim separate from our own response to it. When we come back months later, we can see what persuaded us and where we pushed back. Every habit that leaves such a record is one we already have, pointed at the case the author is building instead of at the lines we happened to like.

  • Fold a corner or highlight the claims we doubt, alongside the lines we love.
  • Keep one note on the phone or in a journal titled with the book’s name, and let the questions or comments pile up there.
  • Park an unfamiliar name in that note and look it up later, rather than breaking off to search in the middle of a page.
  • When a chapter ends, look at its notes at the back. They show the sources behind particular claims and may reveal where the author sees uncertainty or disagreement.
  • Glance at the dates in the bibliography to see whether the author draws on recent work where the field calls for it.

Each of these habits fits into the reading we’re already doing. Kept up across a whole book, they leave a record of our exchange with the author, one that stays on the page and in our own notes after the reading is done. That record leads us naturally to the back of the book, where the author’s notes and bibliography show us the work beneath the argument.

What we add to the book

  • What it is: Marginalia are the notes we write in a book’s margins. A commonplace book is the notebook where we collect passages and questions from everything we read.
  • What it’s for: They turn reading from something we absorb into a conversation we take part in.
  • What it gives us: The record we leave of what persuaded us and what didn’t keeps the book ours to argue with and return to.

Every page covered so far came from someone who helped make the book. Marginalia and the commonplace book come from us instead, written in as we read. By the time we reach the text, we know the argument the author intends to make. Each chapter becomes a step in the case. We can ask whether its evidence supports the claim it was meant to prove. The book becomes an argument we test.

Marginalia are the notes readers write in the margins. Plenty of us already keep a version of them without using the word. A folded corner marks a page we mean to return to. Highlighting in an e-reader, or photographing a page with a phone, saves the line that struck us. Pointing those habits at the argument, instead of at the lines we happened to like, turns reading into an exchange. A question mark beside a sweeping claim marks a place to push back. Underlining a quoted source flags a work to find later.

A commonplace book is a personal notebook where a reader copies passages and questions from everything they read. Keeping one lets us carry questions from one book to the next. The English philosopher John Locke devised an indexing method for his commonplace books so he could find an entry again by topic. The commonplace book’s modern form is the phone in our pocket. A notes app does what Locke’s index did, with a search bar instead of a system. One running note titled with the book’s name, where the photos and saved lines collect, is a commonplace book in everything but the binding.

When a book mentions an event or a thinker we don’t recognize, add the name to the running note and look it up later. We stay with the page for as long as it has our attention. Over time, those notes become a log of how different authors treat one subject. Sooner or later, two of those authors disagree. At that moment, the note turns into a research tool of our own. The back pages of a book with full notes and a bibliography supply that tool with its material.

The notes

  • What it is: Notes are numbered entries tied to specific passages in the text, printed at the foot of each page or gathered at the back of the book.
  • What it’s for: Each note leads us to the source behind a claim and may add the author’s own comment on it.
  • What it gives us: Read alongside the chapter, notes show us how an argument rests on evidence and where the author’s interpretation begins.

Many books gather their notes at the back, though the notes belong to the reading itself. Each one is tied by a number to a passage in the chapter. Flipping back as we go, or reading a chapter’s notes the moment it ends, keeps each claim beside its evidence. Any source can be judged by what it was built on. The notes show that foundation claim by claim.

In the notes, many authors write more candidly than in the chapters. They argue with other scholars there and admit where the evidence runs thin. Reading a chapter’s notes right after the chapter shows us how a claim rests on evidence and where interpretation begins. A long note often marks a claim that needs more explanation than the chapter can hold. It may be where the evidence is contested, where the author qualifies the point, or where another argument waits just off the page.

Some nonfiction books carry no notes at all. Their claims may still rest on extensive reporting, archival work, or expert consultation, but the path back to the evidence is harder for a reader to follow. Look for a page headed Sources, Further Reading, or Selected Bibliography, and read the acknowledgments for the experts, archives, and institutions the author names. When a claim has no trail inside the book, write it down and check it against other reliable work before carrying it forward.

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QA322

Mike's Notes

On a recent visit to Christchurch, NZ, I hunted for libraries with decent math books and found more than I expected.

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QA322

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 18/09/2026

Mike Peters: Mike invented and designed Pipi and founded Ajabbi.

...

Christchurch Public Library System

I found some useful mathematics books in the Christchurch Public Library System.

University of Canterbury

At the University of Canterbury, the library dedicated to physics and engineering is officially called the Engineering and Physical Sciences (EPS) Library | Te Puna PĆ«kaha me te PĆ«taiao. It is at 57 Creyke Road, Ilam, Christchurch 8041. The 100 bus route goes there and stops on Creyke Road. The 3 bus route stops at Ilam Rd, with a short walk to the library

I went hunting for books in the Mathematics Section. The library uses the Library of Congress system. QA322 was the section for books on Functional Analysis. There were a lot of books. I was looking for books on Hilbert Spaces, then broadened my search to John von Neumann, Monte Carlo, nonlinear algebra, chaos, etc. I took a lot of notes and confirmed that Hilbert spaces are highly relevant to Pipi.

Hierarchy of mathematical spaces. 

Hilbert spaces are a subset of Inner product spaces, which are a subset of normed vector spaces, which are a subset of metric spaces, which in turn are a subset of topological spaces. - Wikipedia

I also met, over several days, with staff from the computer engineering, software, and mathematics departments to discuss future collaboration opportunities after Ajabbi's successful scaling.

I'll need to find some very good mathematicians. Their absence will be a limiting factor.

Christchurch

I attended many local meetings with software developers (IT Curry, WordPress Meetup) and met with potential suppliers and agencies. Christchurch seems to offer strong opportunities, talent and interest. I learned a great deal by asking questions and listening.

Books Discovered

Here is a list of books I'm reading or will read, and will order for the future Ajabbi Research Library.

  • The Man from the Future - The visionary life of John von Neumann by Anayo Bhattacharya. Penguin, 2023. (Excellent read)
  • Topology: A Very Short Introduction by Richard Earl. OUP, 2019.
  • 50 Maths Ideas You Really Need to Know by Tony Crilly. Greenfinch, 2022.
  • Chaos Theory & Business Planning by John Legge. Stewart & Wilkinson, 1990.
  • Learning Algorithms: A Programmer's Guide to Writing Better Code, by George A. Heineman. O'Reilly, 2021. (Excellent)
  • Quantum Leaps: How Maths Drives Scientific Progress, by Hugh Barker. Atlantic Books, 2024.
  • Introduction to Monte-Carlo Method by Istvan Manno. Akademai Kiado 1999.
  • Mathematical Techniques by D. W. Smith & P. Smith. OUP, 2008.
  • The Secret Life of Equations by Rich Cochrane. Firefly Books, 2016. (Excellent)
  • Mathematical Modelling: Models, Analysis and Applications by Sandip Banerjee. CRC Press, 2013. (Very useful)
  • Linear Algebra for Dummies by Mary Jane Sterling. Wiley, 2009.
  • Quantum Physics for Dummies by Andrew Zimmerman Jones. Wiley 2024. (Excellent)

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Useful Books For Designers Working On Complex Problems

Mike's Notes

Another wonderful resource list from the one and only Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine fame.

There were too many links to copy here, so check out the original post.

Thanks, Vitaly. 😎

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Useful Books For Designers Working On Complex Problems

By: Vitaly Friedman
LinkedIn: 14/08/2026

Vitaly Friedman: Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing, he’s most probably running front-end & UX workshops. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems. He also runs Smart Interface Design Patterns, a video course and UX training for passionate UX designers.

...

Chances are high that you are working on a challenging, complex product. And perhaps in a difficult and heavily restricted environment, too — a workplace with deep organizational hierarchy, domain complexity, entrenched culture, untamed legacy and conflicting priorities from opinionated stakeholders at every turn.

How do you thrive and survive in such environments? Well, there are no quick answers to that question. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a fantastic overview by Daniel Burka, with books for designers who are setting out to make a lasting difference — in healthcare, education, public service, climate change. So I thought I'll put together a few of my personal book recommendations as well. Let's take a look.

My personal book recommendations for designers working on hard, complex problems.

My Personal Book Recommendations

  • How Big Things Get Done, by Prof. Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. Fantastic research on why complex projects run late and over budget, why right-to-left thinking matters and how to minimize risks of failures and delays.
  • Factfulness, by Hans Rosling. A fantastic book on how to better understand messy reality by learning where progress has happened, where challenges remain and how evidence can guide better decisions.
  • The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. A fictional novel, but a truly insightful book on the importance of flow, bottlenecks and operations in a product/IT company.
  • The Goal, by Eliyahu Goldratt. A legendary classic on improving a system by finding and fixing bottlenecks — for PMs and product or staff designers.
  • Thinking in Systems, by Donella Meadows. Probably the clearest guide I could find about systems thinking, feedback loops and how to intervene at the right time, with the right pace at the right place.
  • Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths. An insightful deep-dive into how people make daily decisions, and how to deal with overwhelming choices.
  • The Culture Map, by Erin Meyer. A wonderful book on how to communicate and work with truly global teams across cultures — from feedback and trust to collaboration and decision-making.
  • Articulating Design Decisions, by Tom Greever. A very practical strategic book on how to communicate UX work effectively to senior management and people who need to approve your work.
  • Narrative Economics, by Robert Shiller. A book focused on economy, but really about how ideas move markets. A great read on how contagious stories, not just data, drive decisions, events and spread impact over time.
  • Envisioning Information, by Edward Tufte. A deep, dense classic on how to deal with complex data and how to display it to maximize clarity. A must-read for every data visualization work.

Not really books for designers, and not books about design either. But great books about planning and thinking: How Big Thigns Get Done and Algorithms To Live By.

  • The Great Mental Models, by Shane Parrish. How people think, grasp new areas, find patterns and understand the world. A lovely series about mental models and how people think.
  • A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander. Actually a book about patterns in architecture, but also about how spaces are organized, and how to think of living and working systems.
  • Org Design for Design Orgs, by Peter Merholz, Kristin Skinner. How to build, structure and scale in-house design teams — on hiring, roles and operating models. Not a topic that's often covered.
  • Thinking in Bets, by Annie Duke. Perhaps a bit of a clichĂ© recommendation, but a lovely book on how to make better decisions under uncertainty, when you don't have enough evidence.
  • The Missing Billionaires, by Victor Haghani and James White. To me, a fantastic book about risk management without being a risk management book. How to strategically approach risk and financial decisions over a long period of time.
  • Why Design Is Hard, by Scott Berkun. A lovely little book about the inherent complexities and challenges of the design process.
  • Practical Charts, by Nick Desbarats. The only practical guide to charts that I found incredibly easy to understand. A must-read for data viz and dashboard design.
  • The Laws of Simplicity, by John Maeda. A classic. A very short book that entirely changed how I think about design decades ago.

New Books For UX and Interface Designers

There are quite a few new UX books that I have on my reading list (and had on it for quite some time), but actually didn't yet find time to get into. So if you're looking for a new book for yourself or for your colleagues, here are a few recent ones that caught my attention (published between 2025 and 2026). I hope you'll find them useful, too.

UX & Product Design

  • Inviting Depth: Richer Research Interviews, by Brandon Berry PhD, Thomas Williams. How to conduct more meaningful research interviews and help researchers uncover deeper insights from users.
  • Research Practice, by Gregg Bernstein. With practical advice and frameworks for effective and ethical research practices.
  • Sentient Design, by Veronika Kindred, Josh Clark. A practical book on how to use AI effectively to design "intelligent" experiences, with many useful insights and practical techniques.
  • UX for AI: A Framework for Designing AI‑Driven Products, by Greg Nudelman. Quite technical at times, but packed with real case studies of how products teams design and build AI experiences from scratch. Currently reading.
  • The Designer's Guide To The Buttons, by Andrey Markelov. Actually a mix of a history book about interfaces and UI components — a comprehensive visual guide to the history, logic, and evolution of user interfaces, from Xerox Alto to Vision Pro.
  • Building The Research Engine, by Julian Della Mattia. A practical guide on how to set up a research practice from scratch and how to make sure that research efforts are noticed and its outcomes are actually used.

  • Shift Happens, by Marcin Wichary. An extensive (!) research on the history of keyboards, keyboard layouts — from early typewriters to the pixellated keyboards in our pocket. Sadly sold out at the moment.
  • Designed With Care, curated by Rachel Edwards. A beautiful overview of how to create inclusive trauma-informed content across various domains.
  • Staff Product Designer, by Artiom Dashinsky. A very honest and practical deep-dive into senior product design roles and career progression.
  • Everything is a Prototype, by Brendan Kearns. How to prototype better, with tools for more productive experimentation.
  • Accessible UX Research, by Michele A. Williams, PhD. Our new Smashing book, on how to conduct inclusive UX research — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias and building trust.
  • Good Services, by Lou Downe. Focuses on the principles behind designing digital services that actually work for people.
  • The Solo: Grow Your Own Digital Products, by Christine Vallaure de la Paz. A practical guide for designers looking to create and scale up their own digital products.

  • The Making of Prince of Persia: Journals 1985–1993, by Jordan Mechner. Per se not a classic design book, but a deep dive into how the legendary game I was playing for months came to be.
  • The Core Model Digital Strategy, by Are Halland. How to approach digital strategy and more strategic, collaborative design.
  • The Path to Senior Product Designer, by Artiom Dashinsky. Another book by Artiom, focusing on the journey and skills required for senior-level product design.
  • Hey UX, Hey PM, by Jeff Carpenter. Interesting: explores collaboration and communication between designers and product managers.
  • The Staff Designer, by đŸ± Catt Small đŸ‘©đŸŸđŸ’». A guide for staff ICs on how to grow, influence, and lead effectively without moving into people management. Catt has a great Maven cohort as well.

Dashboards and Data Visualization

  • CHART: Designing Creative Data Visualizations from Charts to Art, by Nadieh Bremer. Very high on my list as I would trust Nadieh on everything data visualization! How to transform data into impactful visual narratives, moving beyond standard charts.
  • Dashboards That Deliver, by Steve Wexler, Jeffrey Shaffer, Andy Cotgreave, Amanda Makulec. New book on designing impactful dashboards with insights and drive action.
  • Speak Data, by Giorgia Lupi, Phillip Cox. An interesting book on how to communicate complex data effectively. Great for a kitchen table, too!
  • Practical Charts, by Nick Desbarats. A hands-on guide to designing honest and functional charts, with useful decision trees to use.

Cards & Cheat Sheets

For quick reference, here are few lovely card decks and cheat sheets:

  • Storyteller Tactics, by Steve Rawling. A legendary deck of cards to design compelling narratives for presentations and user stories.
  • UX Research Cheat Sheets, by StĂ©phanie Walter. Helpful user interview question cheat sheets, question cards and UXR workshop templates.
  • UI Fonts Checklist, by Oliver Schöndorfer. A practical guide to selecting typefaces for UI design.
  • Smart Interface Design Patterns, by yours truly Vitaly Friedman. My little collection of useful checklist cards for pretty much any UI component!

“But What About AI?”

There are strong voices arguing that many of these books belong to the pre-AI era, and hence they are slightly outdated and not particularly useful.

I strongly disagree. I don't really think that AI makes these books less relevant today — if anything, AI probably amplifies a desperate need for these books to be written and published and read. And I don't think AI can turn good intentions with poor ideas into good design — even with the best context and design harness provided to it.

In the world where we can generate hundreds of flows and prototypes quickly, or hyper-personalize experiences to every individual user, we need to make very, very good decisions on which flows are driving us towards a goal, and how our work drives users to their goals as well.

The books above are about better judgment, about critical and strategic thinking, human-led research, better sense-making and decision making. AI can surely augment it, but the quality lies in humans curating and choosing directions and making better decisions as a result. I'm quite skeptical about people allowing AI to fully take over decisions any time soon.

Useful UX Book Lists

And just in case you need more specialized book recommendations — for entrepreneurs, researchers, accessibility professionals, product managers or behavioral scientists, here are a few useful bookmarks of recommendations by other fine folks.

50 Short Books For Designers, brought together by David Demaree and the team at Bits&Letters.

  • 50 Short Books For Designers, a wonderful directory of free and non-free books, published by A Book Apart, but then disappearing from the web — now brought together in one single place, with freely available versions, references and links in one place. Kindly put together by David Demaree and the team at Bits&Letters.
  • Free Books For Interface & UX Designers
  • Book Recommendations, by Stripe Press
  • UX Research Books, by StĂ©phanie Walter
  • Inclusive Design Books, by Jessica Ivins
  • Books For Accessible Products, by Cat Noone
  • Books For Entrepreneurs, by Intercom
  • Product Management Books, by PaweƂ Huryn
  • Behavioral Science Books, by Robert Meza
  • Data Visualization Books, by Nadieh Bremer
  • Business Books For Designers, by Chris Do
  • Interface Design Books, by Adham Dannaway

Wrapping Up

The world desperately needs patient and passionate designers to improve the messy, complex and legacy-ridden systems that are so common and so frustrating in daily lives of millions of people.

You might feel stuck — in enterprise environments, education, healthcare and public services; yet that's exactly where your design work can make a tremendous impact for people who need it the most. It's at times a painful but extremely rewarding experience, as long as you bring along enough patience and care.

Just one final note. Many of the authors above also provide an incredible amount of free content for everybody to use and learn from. I kindly encourage you to support their work if you can, and always purchase books from their own recommended sources, rather than discount retailers. 

Do you have books you'd add to this list? I'd love to hear your recommendations for books that made a difference for you — please leave a comment below. I try my best to read and answer every single comment and email I receive, so please don't hesitate to reach out.

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Books Have Always Been Destroyed. But Never Like This

Mike's Notes

I love print books and libraries. Books in print are precious. AI needs to benefit humanity, not be a destructive force.

Trinity College, Ireland

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Last Updated

01/09/2026

Books Have Always Been Destroyed. But Never Like This

By: Hana Lee Goldin
Card Catalog: 25/08/2026

Your personal librarian for the AI age. Forever in the pursuit of exploring how we find, filter, and feel about information.

We’ve entered the third era of libricide.

...

Quick summary:

An AI company has been buying up used books by the million and destroying them, scanning the pages for training data and pulping what’s left. Court filings unsealed this year describe the program and an internal note asking that the work be kept from becoming known. A court has ruled that buying and scanning the books this way is legal, and once the work is done, nothing survives to show a book was ever there to lose.

Key takeaways:

  • The books are bought through anonymous middlemen, so the sellers filling the orders rarely know where their stock is headed. From every angle the buying looks like ordinary commerce, which is exactly what keeps the destruction from being seen.
  • Book destruction has a long history, and it changes each time the technology of copying changes. It has shifted twice before. This is the third shift, and it looks nothing like the book burnings most of us picture.
  • This shift is set apart by leaving nothing behind. The words are kept, the object is discarded, and no record says which titles were taken, so the loss can be neither proven nor traced to anyone who might answer for the harm.
  • That reaches past books to anyone who wants to know things firsthand. When the only surviving copy is sealed inside a system no outsider can consult, verifying what it says becomes impossible, and we are left trusting whatever summary we are given.

...

“We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

The sentence appears in an internal Anthropic planning document made public through court filings in Bartz v. Anthropic, the copyright class action that three authors filed in 2024. Anthropic, the maker of Claude, called the program Project Panama. Its stated mission fit in one sentence: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Destructive scanning means cutting a book from its binding, feeding the loose pages through a scanner, and discarding the book afterward. According to the court, Anthropic spent millions of dollars buying millions of print books, often used. Its service providers removed the bindings, cut the pages, scanned them into searchable digital files, and discarded the books. Anthropic kept the scans in an internal digital library and used books from that library to train the AI systems behind Claude.

The lawsuit initially concerned another source of Anthropic’s library: more than seven million pirated book files the company had downloaded. The court treated the two acquisition paths differently. It held that Anthropic could lawfully buy print books, convert them into searchable digital files for internal use, and discard the physical copies; because the resulting files remained inside the company rather than being redistributed, that practice was fair use. It reached the opposite conclusion about the books Anthropic had downloaded from pirate sites and retained.

Companies announce the programs they are proud of; Anthropic tried to keep this one invisible. The January unsealing supplied the project’s codename and the instruction to stay silent. The instruction anticipated what the company did not want authors, booksellers, and the reading public to see: books bought by the million, cut apart, scanned, and discarded. Anthropic didn’t publicly announce Project Panama before court records made it public.

The silence has no precedent. Books have been destroyed for as long as they’ve been made: by conquering armies and offended churches, by censors with lists and mobs with torches, by floods and fires, and by budgets that let the roof leak. Some of it was fast and public. More of it was slow and official. All of it, loud or slow, could be recognized for what it was. A person watching knew that books were being lost. History kept what record it could. But what’s happening now carries no such signature. From the outside, nobody could tell that books were being destroyed at all.

Inside Project Panama

Anthropic hired a man named Tom Turvey in February 2024 and gave him a mission the court record repeats in one sweeping phrase: obtaining all the books in the world. Turvey came to the job from Google Books, the project that spent the 2000s digitizing library collections on machines engineered to turn pages gently, so that every book survived its own scanning. Anthropic took the opposite approach. Gentle machinery never entered the plan. Over roughly a year, the company spent tens of millions of dollars buying millions of print books, sheared off their spines, fed the loose pages through high-speed scanners, and pulped what remained. Vendor proposals in the court records described converting up to two million books in six months, some eleven thousand a day.

Destroying the books solved a financial problem first. A bound book must be scanned page by page, slowly and at cost. Once cut apart, the same volume becomes a stack of loose paper that can run through a sheet feeder at speed. Across millions of volumes, the difference in output determined the method.

The legal significance emerged later. In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled on the authors’ claims. For the books Anthropic had bought and destroyed, he found the copying to be fair use: the rule in American copyright law that allows limited copying without an author’s permission (the way a critic can quote a novel in a review). His reasoning turned on replacement. Anthropic bought one physical copy, made one digital copy, and destroyed the original—so the number of copies in the world never grew. In the law’s eyes, the scan simply took the book’s place, a change of format. If Anthropic had kept both the book and the scan, the number of copies would have doubled and the fair-use argument would have weakened. Pulping the originals helped make the copying legal.

The pirated downloads fared differently in the same ruling. For those more than seven million files, Alsup rejected Anthropic’s fair-use defense. He emphasized that Anthropic had built a permanent, general-purpose library it expected to keep indefinitely, not a temporary collection for a defined training task. “None is even offered here except for Anthropic’s pocketbook and convenience,” he wrote.

The ruling left the company facing a trial over damages, and Anthropic settled instead: the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion. A judge granted the deal final approval on July 20, the largest copyright class settlement in American history. Under the deal, Anthropic will delete the pirated digital files. Critically, the deal concerns those files, not the millions of physical books the company bought and pulped. Copyright protects the text of a book—the creative expression of an idea—not the paper on which those words were printed. Once Anthropic lawfully owned a physical copy, copyright law generally didn’t prevent it from destroying that object. The books could be destroyed without creating the kind of copyright violation at issue in the case.

But books don’t enter a library by themselves: somebody had to sell the company all those books. The court records describe Anthropic purchasing through vendors. This spring and summer, booksellers across Europe described the other side of such a trade: unusually large, eclectic orders placed through intermediaries, with the ultimate buyer unnamed. TomĂĄs Kenny of Kennys of Galway called one order for books “bananas”—a mix of titles no library would plausibly assemble. Whether any particular order came from Anthropic cannot be established from outside the transaction. Nor is Anthropic the only possible customer: other AI companies have also been reported to be acquiring books at industrial scale.

The reported market is built to keep the buyer at a distance. Brokers can aggregate inventory and manage bulk orders without disclosing who is ultimately acquiring the books. ISBNdb, a book-data company, briefly advertised a prospective book-sourcing service for AI developers that promised confidentiality; its marketing explained the appeal bluntly: “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.” (After reporting drew attention to the page, ISBNdb removed it and said the proposed service had never been launched.) The result was not merely secrecy about the buyer, but uncertainty about the fate of the books.

Annihilation, then spectacle

What Anthropic is doing belongs to a history far older than the company. Rebecca Knuth, a professor of library science, named the practice in 2003: libricide, the systematic destruction of books and libraries, usually carried out or authorized by a government. Her subject was the twentieth century’s state-sponsored campaigns, but the practice runs back as far as writing does. The scenes that come to mind of this are the same few: students feeding bonfires in Berlin in 1933, Sarajevo’s national library burning under siege in 1992. But behind those scenes, the record is wider and stranger than they suggest. Bonfires were rarer than the memory of them. Most destruction arrived slowly and with permission, through purges, censors, wars, and simple neglect.

A strict reading of that definition would leave Anthropic out, reserving libricide for the destruction of entire libraries. But that distinction collapses here. The world’s secondhand book trade functions as one enormous collection, scattered across thousands of shops and sellers with no central address. Buying it up by the pallet and pulping it empties a library all the same, just one whose shelves span continents.

Destroying a book has meant different things in different centuries. The difference has always come down to copying, because how books are copied decides how many of any one book exist. When copies are scarce, destruction can erase a work from existence. Once copies are everywhere, destruction can only send a message about one. To me, that line sorts the history of libricide into eras, and what distinguishes each one is what its destruction leaves behind. The result is my own framework, a chronology by residue that I haven’t found anywhere in the scholarship: two eras completed, and a third that has just begun.

For thousands of years, every copy of every book was made by hand. A single volume could take a scribe months, so most works existed in a few manuscripts, and some in only one. Under those conditions, destroying the object destroyed the work, completely and forever. I call this the first era: the era of destruction as annihilation. The word descends from the Latin ad nihil, meaning to reduce or bring something to nothing. In this era the meaning was literal. When Diego de Landa, a Spanish friar in colonial YucatĂĄn, burned twenty-seven Maya codices in 1562, the texts inside them went to ash. No copies of them existed anywhere on earth, so entire bodies of Maya history and belief ended in one afternoon’s fire. The library of Alexandria met the slower version of the same fate, declining through centuries of purges and neglect until its losses ran past counting. What the first era left behind was dust, and one thing more: knowledge of the loss. Contemporaries recorded what had burned. We can still mourn the codices, because the one thing annihilation couldn’t destroy was the memory that the books had existed.

The printing press ended that era within a century of its invention. Once a title could exist in hundreds or thousands of identical copies spread across cities and countries, fire lost its reach. Burning a book now destroyed only an object, since the work lived on in every other copy, safely out of range. Destruction continued anyway, though, serving a different purpose entirely. I call this the second era, the era of destruction as spectacle (a word descended from the Latin spectare, to watch). By the twentieth century, watching had become the entire point of burning a book. The clearest case is the Nazi bonfires of May 1933, when German students burned tens of thousands of volumes in public squares, in front of rolling newsreel cameras. Almost none of the works truly died in those fires, because the titles on the pyres existed in editions across Europe and America (many of which remain in print today). Erasing the books was never the goal, since erasure had stopped being possible. The fires existed to be seen, a threat performed first for the crowd in the square and then for everyone who watched the footage. What the second era left behind was the opposite of ash: photographs and visuals of fires that consumed real books but reached nothing beyond them. Once a book existed in enough copies, burning one no longer removed it from the world. It announced that the book had no place in the world to come.

Destruction as disappearance

Measured against those two eras, what Anthropic is doing fits neither. In the first era, destroying the object meant losing the work. Anthropic’s scanners preserve every word, so the works survive. In the second era, the objects were beside the point and the burning was public theater. This time the objects are destroyed by the millions, and the destruction says nothing at all; it’s not a message but a method. The company ordered the operation kept out of sight. A destruction that erases no text and performs for no one, run at industrial speed, matches neither pattern. The technology of copying has crossed another threshold, the way it did when the press replaced the scribe. What it means to destroy a book now has changed again to match. We’ve entered the third era.

What exactly went into the scanners is the question nobody outside can answer. The unsealed documents show the program favored what its leader called “less common” books, harder-to-find titles over mass-market ones, without ever defining where less common ends. After the claims went viral this summer, the fact-checking site Snopes investigated whether rare books were being pulped. Anthropic told Snopes that “none of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy ‘rare’ or ‘antiquarian’ books.” The assurance can’t be tested from outside, because no list of what was bought has ever been made public.

Anthropic’s own planners estimated the world has about 130 million distinct books. The program destroyed millions of copies, most of them ordinary used books with plenty of surviving duplicates. Even where duplicates survive, a scan keeps only the words. A physical copy carries evidence too, like a censored paragraph that marks one printing apart from another, or an owner’s name inked inside the cover. But the deeper danger sits in the margin nobody can see. Anthropic aimed for “uncommon” titles while recording nothing public about which copies were destroyed. For a book surviving in only a handful of copies anywhere, one bulk order can potentially take the last one. Whether that has already happened is a question no one on the outside knows for sure. The impossibility of answering what was destroyed is what’s new.

The buying also leans toward older books, for a reason that has nothing to do with rarity. Since around 2022, text written by AI has spread across the internet, mixed in with everything people write and mostly impossible to tell apart. That creates a problem for the companies training new models. Feeding a model text written by other models tends to degrade the results, so the builders want sources guaranteed to be human. A book printed before the technology existed carries that guarantee on its copyright page. Old print has become a raw material, valued for the one quality the internet can no longer promise.

One more feature separates this era from the last one. Spectacle-era destruction wanted an audience; this destruction wants the opposite. The buyer is after the text and has no message to send. In fact, attention to its process can only slow the buying down. Taken together, the features of this era line up: the works survive inside a black box, the objects vanish by the millions, no public record exists, and the operation itself prefers to work in secrecy. I call this the third era, the era of destruction as disappearance. The word rests on the Latin apparere, to come into view, with a prefix that reverses the motion. A disappearance is a departure from visibility. The word fits this era at every layer, from the unseen sales to a program that only appeared when a court forced it into view.

Every one of these books, preserved to the letter, can now be read by no one. The scanned texts sit in Anthropic’s private collection, a library with no reading room and no public catalog. Models trained on that collection are built to avoid quoting it at length, because reproducing long passages for users is the copyright violation no court has excused. So the machines answer questions about books without ever showing the books themselves. When someone asks a model about a title that survives only in that collection, what comes back is a summary, written in the model’s words, with the original nowhere in reach.

That arrangement changes something basic about how we can know things. Checking a claim against its source is the foundation of thinking for ourselves. When we can pull the book, find the page, and read the passage in context, we get to judge whether the summary was faithful and whether the quote meant what someone claims it meant. Remove the book and that judgment has nowhere to stand. We’re left taking the summary on trust, with no way to confirm and no standing to doubt. Whatever the model says the book said becomes, for all practical purposes, what the book said. That’s a transfer of authority from the page to the tool, from a source anyone could check to an answer nobody can. The transfer happens one unreachable book at a time.

Maddeningly, every piece of this design is legal. Each one also removes a question that used to have an answer. The anonymous purchasing means nobody can list which books were destroyed, so nobody can rule out that some were the last copies anywhere. With the collection sealed, nobody can compare a stored text against the printed original it replaced, so even perfect fidelity can never be shown. As for whether the buying ever stopped, nobody outside knows that either, since the only reason anyone knows it started is that a piracy lawsuit dragged the records into the open. None of this took a conspiracy, only ordinary business decisions about what to disclose, all of them legal and every one of them closing a door.

One more thing disappears along with these books: the ability to mourn them. The previous era’s destruction left survivors who could testify to what was lost. Alexandria’s losses were lamented for centuries. Sarajevo’s librarians catalogued what their fire took. The third era leaves no one who can even compile the list. A loss we can name is a wound. One we can't name is just a world grown slightly smaller, with nothing to point to and no way to prove it. A librarian would describe the situation in the profession’s terms: no accession record and no deaccession record, a transaction that leaves no ledger for anyone to audit. Put simply, they’ve created a system in which they can’t be held accountable for the system they’ve created. That understanding defines destruction as disappearance: the loss was built, from the start, to be impossible to establish.

What can still be known

The concealment had one structural weakness: a program that buys millions of books needs sellers, and a company that breaks the law can be sued. Sellers and courts are the two doors into the secrecy — sellers see every order even when they can’t see the buyer, and courts can compel what the company won’t volunteer. Everything now known about the program came through one door or the other. Authors sued and forced the internal records open. Booksellers noticed matching orders across two countries and brought them to reporters; one worked with the journalists at 404 Media to hide a tracking device inside a shipment of books, and the tracker led to an Amazon warehouse outside Las Vegas — evidence that a retail giant appears to be running a scanning program of its own. Within weeks, at least one supplier that had been advertising bulk books for AI training pulled the offer. No regulator opened either door. Every disclosure came from the people the company bought from or the people it answered to in court.

Some sellers went further than noticing. Once TomĂĄs Kenny, whose Galway shop had received one of the strange 5,000-book orders, worked out where books like his might be headed, he said publicly that Kennys wanted no part of scanning aimed at extracting intellectual property. His shop had been the second in the world to put its books online, back in 1994; it now became one of the first to refuse the trade that takes books offline for good. Kenny could refuse because he had worked out the destination, which is exactly the discovery the brokers’ anonymity exists to prevent. A trade that hides its purpose from its own suppliers has already answered the question of whether the suppliers would approve.

The same kind of attention is available to the rest of us, because most of us eventually stand over a box of books deciding where they go, after a move or the clearing of a family house. That box is where all of this arrives at our own doorstep. A seller, or any of us selling to one, can now ask a question that has a good reason to be asked: where do these books go next? The anonymity that keeps this market running survives only as long as nobody asks. For material that might be scarce, like a town history or a box of local records, the open market is no longer the safe default. A library’s special collections desk exists for exactly that kind of donation. And the same habit applies at the other end of the pipeline: when a model summarizes a book for us, we can treat the answer as a starting point and go find the book itself, while findable copies still exist. Each of those is a small act of keeping track.

That kind of record-keeping has been the difference between the eras all along. Each era’s destruction left a residue, a testament of a kind. The first era of annihilation left ashes and knowledge of the devastation. The second era of spectacle left photographs of the fires and the threat those fires were meant to carry. Ours, this third era of disappearance, leaves no ash, no image, and no list. But what’s still open is the record itself: whether one gets kept, and whether anyone outside can access it at all.

...

Thanks for reading

...

The three eras are a framework I built for this piece, and I want to take it further (it’s such fascinating stuff!): a full treatment of how book destruction has changed across five thousand years and what the third era asks of the people living in it. Before I build it though, I’d love to get a temperature read on the format you’re most interested in.

See the poll on the Substack to vote.

Nazi Book Burning

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

On May 10, 1933, German students under the Nazi regime burned tens of thousands of books nationwide. These book burnings marked the beginning of a period of extensive censorship and control of culture in Adolf Hitler's escalating reign of terror.

In this short film, a Holocaust survivor, an Iranian author, an American literary critic, and two Museum historians discuss the Nazi book burnings and why totalitarian regimes often target culture, particularly literature.

YouTube: Nazi Book Burning

14 May 2013 09:41

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