"Owning the photocopies exempts the student from actually reading them. This sort of vertigo of accumulation, a neocapitalism of information, happens to many"

I love this example of the photocopier. I fell prey to exactly what Umberto Eco warned against. In college (in the mid-1990s) I would accumulate photocopies of articles. I even made a little magazine of curated articles with a low quantity print run with the intent of sharing. But the curation of the articles in my magazine didn't have much in terms of annotation. I might have made a few notes on the side before producing copies of the magazine, but not enough comments to really make it my own.

And now that is repeating again with my use of creating PDFs of articles. Just this weekend, I looked up some PDFs I made ten years ago. I hoped I would have given some insight in the margins about a particular topic. Sadly, the margins were blank.

Your post here is a great reminder to me not just to highlight, but actually to reword the highlights into my own words.

And thank you for the balanced look at the issues of storing quotes in a Zettelkasten. Hmmmm, now that I type that out... that's just it. Storing quotes in a Zettelkasten is what we would rather avoid. Just the storing. Instead, we want to USE the quotes. Build on, explain, and digest the quotes.