One of the reasons that I like reading on an ereader is the ease of highlighting quotes. I can just highlight it and keep going. The other thing that I really like is that because I’m using a Kindle app is that those quotes are automatically imported into Goodreads for me.
I know that lots of people don’t like Goodreads but this is one of features that I would really miss.
When I’m reading paper books and I come across sections that I would like to annotate I tend to be at a loss for what to do. Most of my books are from the library so I can’t just go highlighting in them. How do most people handle this?
Ideally, I would find a way to get the section I want to remember and be able to upload it to Goodreads the same way I can with ebooks. That doesn’t appear to be an option. It seems to me that it really, really should be. I would like to wave a wand and have someone fix that please.
The next option would be to copy the quote on a notecard or in a journal or something. Obviously that would totally work but:
- It stops the flow of reading
- What do I do with the card/journal then? My goal is to record the quote for use in blog posts or videos. I’d also like them attached to my Goodreads record (which we’ve already established I can’t do but I’m salty about this.)
Having it in a journal is nice but not exactly what I need.
So are there apps out there that do what I want? I tried a bunch. So far I haven’t found it. Everything is a paid app. I don’t want to add a subscription for something I’m not going to be using daily. Nothing really fit the bill of what I wanted. They all had a different angle. Readwise sends you daily emails of quotes you’ve kept. That’s fine but not what I was looking for. Other apps wanted you to track when you started and stopped reading for the day. I don’t care.
What I did like was their use of optical recognition to take a picture of the page and transform that into a typed out quote. Could my phone do that by itself? Turns out, sort of. I got it to work best by using my Evernote app. It has an optical reader function that works pretty well. I can make a note in there and take a picture of a written page. Evernote will convert it to type. It is still slow and clunky. It isn’t linked to a record of a book online which was the whole point. It is a paid app but I am already paying for Evernote because that is where I keep all my continuing education notes and all my recipes so it wouldn’t be a new subscription.
I still haven’t found a solution I’m happy with for paper library books though.
While I was in the middle of trying different options I happened to mention it to my mom. She wondered why I even wanted to keep a record of quotes. Sometimes I forget that not every reader is a weird book blogger who records these things.
Honestly, probably the easiest answer is to take a picture in the moment in order to have a record for the blog post and move on with my life. If I was looking to be all aesthetic I would keep some little post-its nearby and flag pages. I could even do a nice commonplace book with quotes if I really liked them.
I love ereaders for this reason too (and other reasons). It’s so much easier to highlight and keep the quotes from my Kindle. For paper books, I use sticky flags to mark the passages as I’m reading. Then after I finish the book, I go back and type up all the quotes onto a word document. It’s a bit time-consuming, but the results are worth it. I have a VERY LONG document of all the quotes I have from books. ha. I try to go back and reread them all over the course of the next year or so. Good luck finding what works for you!
I have no good answer- I have tried pretty much everything, including taking pictures, but what happens is, when I go to review it, I forget about the picture and will inevitably find it years later like “what is this random book page about”? ? That is to say, I love the ebook option to save stuff, and that is probably my absolute favorite thing about ebooks too!