While perhaps slow to e-books (“books are to be held, felt, etc.”), I’ve 100% converted to the Kindle lifestyle when reading. Besides books I already own or ones given to me by friends or via the #SportsBiz Book Exchange, I read exclusively on my Kindle.
In the past year, reading has cemented its place in my routine, but I always felt that I was not retaining enough of the material. I began making extensive highlights on my Kindle* and saving them in Evernote notebooks (Note that this can be done on any device in the Kindle app, you don’t need an actual Kindle device.).
This allows me to keep an outline of each book I read, as well as a searchable database of the most important points. I can quickly scan the outline and refresh my memory of the contents.
Here’s How.
Make highlights throughout the book you’re reading in the Kindle app. I try to highlight a basic overview of the book, organized with chapter and section titles. I also make a “note” if it is something particularly interesting or tied to a project or topic I want to dig more into. Here’s the Amazon overview on highlights, bookmarks and notes in Kindle.
Amazon keeps a record of all notes and highlights at https://read.amazon.com/. Visit this page, and select the book you’d like to get your notes and highlights from the left side navigation. You’ll see an outline of your notes and highlights as below.
Unfortunately copying and pasting from this page comes out a mess. That’s where Bookcision comes in.
Visit https://www.norbauer.com/bookcision/ and install the Bookcision link in your browser. This will make copying and pasting a snap. With a book selected, you can hit the Bookcision link in your browser toolbar, and a screen like this will show up.
You can copy to clipboard (if you have Flash), download a TXT file or simply highlight it all and do an old fashioned copy and paste.
Now I go into Evernote, and create a new ‘note’ in my ‘notebook’ called “Books”. I create a new note for every book I read an paste the highlights from Bookcision into Evernote.
I put the title and author in the notebook name and associate some tags to help me stay organized. For some books, I’ll dive in a little more and add links to podcasts, YouTube videos or related articles. I’ll also typically add some bold and underlines to call out the most important points. Sometimes i’ll get a little more organized with the formatting. If you’re going to reformat, I’d recommend downloading the TXT file — it looks worse at first, but has less funky formatting than the copy-paste method.
Having this in Evernote, I can easily scan the key points from any book I’ve read as well as have keyword search for anything I might be looking for but forgotten where it’s from. Evernote also gives you the ability to snap photos easily into notebooks (I use this for paper reads) and a bunch of other worthwhile features.
Would love to chat with anyone more about my system and hear more about yours. I encourage you to come up with a system that works for you and helps you retain more information from the books you invest time reading.