Digital reading, highlights and notes

Sep 19, 2019

When reading, I consider the ability of highlighting and taking notes a basic requirement. If I can’t do it in some way, even with rudimentary copy and past, my reading experience becomes much less rich.

The possibilities

The arrival of digital reading should help us with annotations, improving them and opening new possibilities.

Some of the obvious improvements over analog include:

Besides that, we should also explore new ideas and possibilities, instead of just mirroring what we used to do in paper. On the other hand, obviously, not everything is progress: some analog features are difficult to replicate.

The actual state

However, the actual state of it always bothered me. After all these years, we still lack a standard way of handling annotations. They work in different ways depending on the file format, the platform you are using and other details. This causes many problems, such as:

  1. Your annotations can easily get spread over all kinds of services, apps, etc.
  2. Interoperability is nearly nonexistent. I can’t browse the annotations I have in different platforms in a central place.
  3. They can get vendor locked.
  4. They are stored (and exported) in many different formats.
  5. Importing annotations from one place to other varies from difficult to virtually impossible.
  6. Good luck if you ever want (or need) to change software while reading a ton of books… You’ll probably need to stick to both and go back and forward to see your annotations spread over them.

All that is inelegant and inefficient. We still get the benefits I listed above, but in a limited and messy way. Worse yet, we barely advanced in exploring new ideas. Consequently, we are far from taking advantage from all the possibilities the digital opened to us.

Storing and exporting

Let’s see some examples of how things work currently.

A possible solution and more problems

We just saw that many software have some way to export your annotations. So we could think of a solution as the following:

It is just a matter of using applications that support exporting to a nice format. Use them to read the book and annotate it. Export the annotations when finishing the book. Store all them in a same folder.

This is more or less my current strategy (which I will detail next), but it is still far from ideal.

For example, what if you want to see your annotation IN the book? Let’s say I want to build my digital library, and all my books would have my annotations, like in real life. How would a separate folder with tons of annotations would achieve that?

Worse than that. As I said, e-books annotations should give us more features, such as browsing the book by them, maybe searching them by genre, etc. None of those is given by a html or docx file with my highlights.

A second solution: books and annotations together

So what can we do to have a personal library with our digitally annotated books?

Well, since each app has their own internal method of storing the annotations, you’ll have to pretty much stick with a particular software all your life. This has, at least, 4 problems:

So no luck.

My strategy

If you read until here, you’re probably thinking “what a mess”! And I agree.

I’ll try to shine some light with my current strategy to keep my digital annotations:

This aims to:

A big part of how you implement that strategy and how well it will work depends on your habits, and which formats and platforms you use. Here is one example of it in action:

It’s a shame that, in 2019, the best strategy I developed for myself still has some important compromises. For the future, I hope we finally get a standardized way of doing all that.

Btw, if you happen to use a Kindle, this post might interest you.


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