My Kindle highlights were a mess until I started using Readwise

I’ve been a compulsive highlighter and note-taker on the Kindle ever since I obtained my first e-reader again in 2010. I am going by dozens of books yearly and generate a whole bunch of highlights of attention-grabbing quotes, technical knowledge, or simply well-written prose. However anybody who’s used a Kindle for any period of time will know that managing highlights could be a actual chore. Regardless of making a number of the finest e-readers and probably the greatest book studying apps round, Amazon nonetheless treats storing and reviewing these necessary nuggets as an afterthought.

Sure, I’m conscious that the Kindle robotically syncs highlights to the web site — so long as the guide was bought through Amazon. Nevertheless, I wish to learn lots of copyright-free books sourced through Undertaking Gutenberg, scientific journals, and ebooks straight purchased straight from the creator’s web site. The Kindle totally skips syncing highlights on these, making the built-in answer a non-starter for me.

Over time, I’ve manually transferred my notes between Kindles, imported the textual content information to apps like OneNote, and even dabbled in utilizing OCR to copy-paste highlights straight from my Kindle to a notes app. And proper off the bat, I can verify: all these strategies suck. One answer lastly labored for me: Readwise.

A few months again, I stumbled throughout a web site referred to as Readwise. The service has been designed from the bottom as much as handle highlights and annotations from throughout the web — together with the Kindle.

Getting began with Readwise is fairly simple. When you’ve arrange the app, all you must do is join your Kindle to your laptop and level the import instrument on the clippings.txt saved within the paperwork folder in your Kindle. Give it a number of seconds; the web site imports all of your present highlights. That’s the place the enjoyable begins.

Not like standard highlighting or sticking a sticky observe in a bodily guide, Kindle highlights aren’t straightforward to seek out or lookup shortly. It takes deliberate motion to open the notes tab in your Kindle or to go to the web site to seek out the desired notes. Readwise solves that Kindle downside.

The service hyperlinks up all my highlights to books and their respective authors. It’ll even pull up the date on which I created the spotlight. I can browse, tag, or favourite particular highlights that stand out to me.

After I discover one thing inciteful I need to share on social media, Readwise lets me create an attractive Instagram-friendly title card and graphic. I are inclined to share many quotes from books I’m studying on Instagram, and this function has are available extraordinarily helpful to make these inciteful tidbits look extra visually pleasing.

However whereas all that’s nice for organizing highlights, the complete act is a bit pointless if it doesn’t encourage revision. Your entire thought behind highlighting is to have the ability to return and bear in mind all of these necessary bits. That’s the place Readwise’s built-in Day by day Evaluation function is available in.

Like a standard flashcard system, the Day by day Evaluation pulls up six highlights from my database of highlights and encourages me to work together with them. I can swipe to discard a spotlight or mark it as a favourite in order that it surfaces extra typically in my suggestions.

The suggestions system is highly effective and customizable sufficient to allow you to downrank or enhance the frequency of highlights from sure books. For instance, I’ve set a number of technical manuals to by no means present up within the day by day evaluations feed. Conversely, highlights from non-fiction titles like biographies seem extra typically in my overview. Higher but, I can examine all my highlights and flashcards on each Android and iOS, as an alternative of sticking with the net app.

One other function that I take pleasure in is the flexibility so as to add supplemental reads to my highlights. As soon as enabled, Readwise begins exhibiting you further highlights made by different customers from books you’ve learn. If you’re an audiobook individual, this has the additional benefit of providing you essential highlights from books you’ve listened to however clearly haven’t been in a position to spotlight.

Within the months I’ve been utilizing it, Readwise has remodeled right into a catch-all spot for all my important studying from across the web. I additionally use it to ship over highlights from insightful articles and to avoid wasting attention-grabbing X/Twitter threads.

I’m additionally utilizing it to synchronize highlights from my present newsreader of alternative — Inoreader — to avoid wasting necessary bits from the information I then use for analysis. The app also can faucet into widespread bookmarking providers like Pocket and Instapaper, amongst others.

Lastly, if I do discover myself reaching out for an outdated favourite guide that isn’t out there as in digital kind, Readwise has a very cool trick up its sleeve. It lets me take an image of the web page and convert the textual content right into a digital spotlight to annotate and save.

Regardless of their restricted performance, I really like the truth that Kindle highlights are actually only a continuously up to date textual content file. This implies it’s straightforward sufficient to learn the file on almost any platform. I can’t say the identical for a service like Readwise. In my time on the web, I’ve seen too many unbelievable providers get acquired and killed or simply die out — I’m taking a look at you, Google Reader.

That’s to say, I don’t need the valuable highlights I’ve gathered over a whole bunch or 1000’s of hours of studying locked behind a service which will or could not exist a few years down the road. Fortunately, Readwise means that you can simply export all of your highlights. In actual fact, it does one higher. You may arrange the service to synchronize with every thing from Obsidian and Notion to Logseq and extra esoteric providers. You may even do an old-school CSV or Markdown export for final portability.

Suffice it to say that if there’s a strategy to learn it, there’s a strategy to get annotations and highlights into Readwise. The service has turn into an indispensable instrument in how I handle and make sense of my day by day studying — each on the Kindle and past, and is an prompt suggestion for anybody who often reads, highlights, or bookmarks textual content snippets.