How to remember what you read, using your Kindle
Do you ever read a book, but a week later remember very little? Maybe it’s middle age creeping up on me, but I’ve been feeling that a lot lately. Slightly worried that I was heading into the muddled world of forgetfulness rather earlier than I had anticipated, I googled around and came across something called the “Forgetting Curve”. In essence this is a curve that shows how information is lost over time if there is no effort made to retain it. I learned that newly learned knowledge lasts only a matter of days unless you make a conscious effort to review it again. Anyway, slightly reassured it wasn’t just me, I decided to find a way to help book content in particular linger in my mind for long enough to actually make a difference to my life.
I have created a workflow that is genuinely increasing my ability to retain what I’ve read, and which prompts me when I forget. Here’s the process I went through….
Active reading: Read with determination and intention.
Firstly, rather than just read, we need to highlight lines we want to remember, passages that resonate with us, pertinent quotes etc. The Kindle, or the Kindle app on a tablet, is excellent at doing this.
All you need to do is long tap on the first word and wait for the Highlight menu to appear, then drag your finger to extend the word selection. Kindles are not great text inputting tools, so I generally just highlight and leave it at that, but if you’re reading on a tablet you might feel like adding a brief note as well (click on the note tab) to expand on why you’ve highlighted this text. (You also have the option to share the highlighted section via email or to Goodreads).
These highlights are automatically stored in a clippings file, but I didn’t find this in itself, particularly useful until I learned that it could be exported. And then it became powerful.
Retrieving your Kindle notes
If you want to stay purely within Kindle, then go to read.amazon.com. It will prompt you to log in with your Amazon account details. I’ve been reading on a Kindle for over 10 years, but have only just found this site!
It will take you to your current book and show you your highlights:
This might be all most people need, but I wanted to be able to do more — I wanted to interact with my highlights and be able to export them. So, after yet more googling, I found Readwise.
Readwise — the app that reminds you to revisit and learn from your reading.
I may do a full review of Readwise another day, but in summary this lets you connect and sync highlights from a variety of sources, not just a Kindle. You can connect your Pocket, Twitter, Apple Books or Instapaper account for example. More importantly perhaps you can export your highlights automatically to Evernote, Notion, Roam, CSV, Markdown…. Etc. And as if that wasn’t enough, it does more. Each day it emails me (frequency is up to you) with five of my highlights to review again. It understands that highlighting is great, but what’s the point if you’re not going to see those highlights again?
At this point I was lamenting that I hadn’t found this app earlier. All those fantastic quotes I have read over the years and have now forgotten! But, no, they’ve thought of that too with “Supplemental Books” where you can search for books you’ve read in the past, and it will show you popular highlights made by other people from that book. You can then save these quotes as your own within Readwise.
The downside with this app is that you initially only get one month’s free trial. Otherwise, the price ranges from a “lite” version at $4.49 per month to the full version at $7.99. However, you can earn free months by referring others. (Click here if you fancy subbing me a free month, as well as two months free for yourself! Thank you). So, what could I do that would be free forever?
Next stop was Goodreads…
Goodreads — a community of readers.
Goodreads also provides another place to access your Kindle highlights automatically, in a very similar way to read.kindle.com, but it takes it one step further by integrating it within the Goodreads’ community. Log in with your Amazon user id. (If you haven’t already linked your Kindle account to Goodreads, click here). Click on your avatar top right, and you’ll see “Kindle Notes & Highlights”. The difference here is that you can choose if you want to share and also comment on your individual quotes with your friends and followers. You can also see highlights and thoughts from the same book other members of the community have shared, friends or not. Nice — another way to reinforce what you’ve learned. I’ve found it interesting to see what others have found meaningful to them from the same book.
But what about if you just want to extract your own highlights in a nicely formatted output, to wherever you want them to go, for free? Perhaps to save them in your own “Personal Knowledge System”. I have my “Second Brain” set up within Obsidian. I review my books there, just for myself, and I wanted to be able to copy and paste my highlights there too.
And, hurrah, there is an easy way to do this too….
Enter Bookcision
This is a Javascript bookmarklet created by… good ol’ Readwise. It provides a bridge for your highlights from read.amazon.com to your computer. All you need do is first drag the button provided on the Bookcision website to your browser’s bookmark bar, then log in at read.amazon.com. Click on the book title you want to review and click on the Bookcision button on your bookmark bar. Wait a few moments for your data to appear…
Then you have two options, either “copy to clipboard” or “download”.
Personally, I just select all the text manually, right click and select “copy”. (The “copy to clipboard” option didn’t work for me as it wanted Flash to be installed which I don’t have). Then paste it into a new page on Obsidian.
Beautiful, and also, look how it provides a hyperlink to the highlight location (assuming you have the Kindle app on your tablet). This is just what I needed. My search was complete.
Summary: My preferred workflow
- I read and annotate using the Highlight option within Kindle
- After I’ve finished the book I make sure my Kindle is connected to wifi and sync, which sends my highlights to the read.kindle.com
- After loading read.kindle.com, I hit the Bookcision button on my bookmark bar
- I select all the text and paste it into a new Obsidian page
- I then create my review of the book at the top of the page, with my highlights neatly displayed underneath
- I tag / link my Obsidian review page appropriately so when I search for keywords in the future, my book notes appear.
- Whilst I’m thinking about this book and what I’ve learned, I’ll review further in Readwise and Goodreads to see what others thought and to see if I’ve missed any good quotes I want to add.
- Readwise prompts me to reconsider my reading by sending me adhoc highlights each day.
I hope this helps you think about your perfect workflow and gives you some ideas to help consolidate what you read. I’d love to hear about your own preferences and any tips you can give me that work for you.
And incidentally, I can highly recommend the book featured in this article, Start Finishing by Charley Gilkey.
Happy active reading!
Originally published at http://mundanemeanderingmusings.wordpress.comon March 7, 2021.
