HACKER Q&A
📣 stayingwithher

Good solution for storing notes/excerpts from books?


There's been a lot of talk about personal information management on HN of late, which made think of this.

I've been mostly making notes on my kindle and then other random stuff (highlighted pdf files, text files, screenshots, etc).

Is there any "modern" solution for handling book notes/excerpts I'm not aware of?


  👤 jborichevskiy Accepted Answer ✓
No global solution I've seen.

Best overview of the landscape I've seen so far is here [0]

Personally I've been using a combination of Roam Research [1] and Readwise [2]. Used Notion [3] for a while but it's very hard to tag data.

0 - https://beepb00p.xyz/annotating.html

1 - https://roamresearch.com/

2 - https://readwise.io/

3 - https://www.notion.so/


👤 whatitdobooboo
I use evernote. It's really useful once you get used to tagging your notes.

I have a broad notebook called "Books" and then tag each post with relevant topics. As you continue to add to evernote in other domains with similar tags you can aggregate all the information into one place.

You can even make a tag of the bookname and go from there.

Bear is a cheaper alternative but i personally didn't like it too much.


👤 jamesxv7
Recently I being using iPhone Notes. One note per book using the camera to take screenshots.

👤 lbyaus
You can use Google Keep. It is Google's note keeping service/app and it is free. Google sites and docs also can perform many of the same functions as Keep and are free also.

👤 nniroclax
Readwise is great for revisiting kindle highlights and notes