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Stan Skrabut: Well, thank you ever so much for taking time to listen to this podcast. It certainly means a lot. I know you could be doing other things, perhaps you are, but you’re still hanging out with me and I really do appreciate it. Approximately two weeks ago, Thomas Frank introduced me to a new tool through one of his YouTube videos. Once I understood what it could do, I knew that I needed to get my hands on it and put it in my mix of tools. I’m still just getting familiar with it, figuring out exactly what it can do. I knew I had to make sure that you knew about it also and this tool is called Readwise. I got it as an easy way to export my Kindle notes and highlights and get them into Evernote. Then from Evernote, I move them over to them Zotero.
The whole goal of this thing was to, I had all these notes in Kindle. I didn’t realize how many, but I had a lot of notes in Kindle and I wanted to get them into Zotero so I could put them to better use as part of my research. I saw that Readwise could do this and had to have it in my hands. With this tool, I was able to really do stuff that I couldn’t do no matter how hard I try made with other tools and other methods. Basically, that was getting my notes out of Kindle.
Let me tell you a little bit on how this works. When you go to the Kindle or when you go to the Readwise dashboard, it’s broken up into three major areas. Connect and sync, you have your configure reviews, and you have your browse highlights. The connect and sync is where the magic happens. In this case, like I said, I was focused on two processes. One was importing Kindle notes and then exporting them to Evernote. On the import process with Kindlewise, I was able to connect to my Kindle account. Matter of fact, when I log in to Readwise, I’m using my Amazon account which has my Kindle notes. Once I started the sync, it quickly brought in the highlights for 116 books. Now that it is it’s connected, it will automatically bring in any new highlights from all the applications I’m connected to, but because I’m connected to Kindle, when I highlight some new books, it automatically creates a new note in Evernote with those highlights.
Now, as I said, Kindle is not the only application you can connect to. Readwise we’ll let you automatically sync with 12 different applications such as Twitter, Hypothesis, Goodreads, Feedly, Instapaper, Pocket, and many more. I just today connected Hypothesis. I’m looking forward to seeing how that works, but also those are the ones that will do automatic syncs. Anytime you capture highlights using say Hypothesis, then Readwise will push them right over to Evernote for me but it also will allow you to capture, although manually, from PDF documents, CSV files, Scribe documents, or you can use the app on your phone, take a picture of a page, make highlights on the page, and that will also be brought in to Readwise.
The other half of the connection piece is exporting and I was able to connect Readwise to my Evernote account. When I basically hit the switch, all the highlights from all the 116 books were sent over to Evernote as 116 notes in Evernote with all my highlights and all my notes. This is huge. Everything was there, broken down note by note. With Readwise, you can also connect to a program called Notion and Roam. I haven’t used these applications, but I’ve heard a lot about them and maybe one day I’ll check them out, but right now I’m happy with Evernote. I’m just going to go down that road.
Another way that you can export files is you can export your highlights to a CSV file or markdown files for other uses that you want to. Really easy to do. You connect, you either log in or you provide an API code and you are then set up and Readwise will walk you through that entire process. The other piece, the second piece I want to talk about is called configure reviews. Readwise allows you to configure different features for email and broadcasting. The day after I signed up for Readwise, I received an email. This email contained five of my highlights randomly selected, but five of the highlights from my book. It caught me by surprise when it initially happened because I wasn’t expecting. I didn’t do any more looking at Readwise because I only had one purpose in mind. I wanted to get my notes from Kindle over to Evernote.
I get this email and it’s like, “Oh, this is interesting.” It is a great way to be reminded of all the wisdom found in your books and the articles that you read. Every day now, I will get an email with these five highlights. I can certainly adjust this so I can dictate how often I want to receive an email as well as how many highlights I want to see and you can further dive in and dictate what how many highlights you want to receive from each book. Some books, you may think they’re more important than others and you want to see more of their highlights. You can change the frequency. Then there’s some books. I don’t really care to see any highlights. I can set that to never and I won’t get anything from them.
This so far has been a pleasant surprise and it’s nice to see what I thought was important at the time. Readwise has also gamified this feature. You are encouraged to read your highlights. You’re encouraged to read your email and hit the selection that says, “I’ve finished reading this thing.” Readwise will measure your reading streak, how often that you’ve kept up your streak and you’re compared to other folks. It is interesting, always looking for gamification of something. This was definitely in my wheelhouse.
Also within the configure reviews, you could set the broadcasting settings. Basically, you don’t have to keep these highlights to the books to yourself. You can share them with others. Through Readwise, you are provided with a unique link that you can share and you can share it through email, Twitter, or Facebook. You have this link that you can set out. Today, once again, I use the Facebook feature to put it on the page that I have in Facebook and it’s basically my author page. I talk a lot about reading because of my book. I put that out there so folks can follow the things that I’m reading. When individuals click on the link, they will be given a form that they join with their email address and then they also will receive emails with highlights, from books that I have read so they get the benefit from my learning journey, a sharing thing. I’ll be curious if anyone ever signs up, but it is available and I do have that link down into the show notes so you can check it out.
Once you have everything configured the way you want it, you have the import and export application set up, you’ve configured your email, you’ve configured your broadcast. The real essence is found in the browse highlights. This is where the meat of everything is. One of the first links you have his books. If you click on books, you’ll see a list of all your books. I have 116 books. It shows all the books and for each book, it will show you how many highlights you have and when you last read that book. Clicking on the book will show you all the highlights and the notes for that particular book.
With each note, you can add tags in order to better organize your books, you can save it as a favorite, provide edits to the note, maybe add additional notes to it, or you can share it with others. If you share it to Twitter or Facebook, Readwise will create this cool graphic with the quote, the book cover, a title, and an author. It looked really nice. I thought it was definitely pretty cool. I just discovered this capability. Depending on what highlight I see come up, I’m going to try to put it in action and share this out to the rest of the world.
Now, naturally, it’s tied back to Readwise so others will come back to the Readwise in order to further, I guess. It’s a great way to promote Readwise, but just another way of highlighting some cool stuff that’s out there. Another way you can look at your books is through tags. These are tags that you create and you assign. You can create a tag at the note level. You can also do while you’re doing your daily reviews. A note comes by on your email. There’s an opportunity to create a tag for it. As you’re going through your notes and it may be a way of tagging you the notes as you want. I haven’t played with this yet. I’ve only been using Readwise probably less than two weeks. I’m looking forward to seeing how this will work.
There’s also a process for inline tagging. If you’re creating a note by hand, there’s a way that you can add tags and I would encourage you to go to Readwise and see exactly how to do this. I still have to, like I said, further, explore this idea of tagging in Readwise. Then if you put in articles, you will have a link that allows you to look at your articles or if you add supplemental books, maybe you’re listening to an audiobook. There’s not necessarily a way that you can get your audiobook in there. It doesn’t capture audio notes, but if you add the book, Readwise will tell you what other folks have found important through Kindle for example, and they will provide you with some notes.
I tried it on book, it only provided a small set of notes, but I’ll have to see where that goes. The last piece of that being able to do the book reviews, the browse highlights is called Mastery and Mastery is basically flashcards that you can look at it, take a note and indicate it that you want it to be one of these– add it to your mastery list and it will allow you to practice information recall and help your retention of that information. I spoke to about this in ITC: 81.
This is nice to see another tool that you can use for information recall and like I said, you can go in and identify the different notes that you want to add to this mastery mix. That’s basically the essence of Readwise. It has a nice search feature. You put in a term and it’ll show you all the notes relative to that search feature. It’s certainly looking specifically for those words, but I found that it was quite good. This particular tool is filling a niche that I had in my learning workflow.
As I mentioned, my purpose for investing in Readwise was to get the highlights out of Kindle so I can use them in my research. I now use Readwise to add to my learning system because it automates a lot of that process. My learning system is multi-part. First part is capturing and research. This is the first part of my system.
In this particular case, all I do is simply highlight notes in my Kindle device, or I could make annotations in a book and use the Readwise app in order to capture that page and make sure I can highlight what I captured and it’ll create a note from that but the cool thing is that Readwise will automatically move my highlights to Evernote and any new highlights will be appended to the appropriate notes.
If I start reading a book and it takes me a couple of days, Readwise every day, will go in and collect the notes that I have, or the highlights that I have taken and send them off to Evernote automatically and then anything new that I add will get appended to the bottom of that. That I’m finding exciting because I been not using my Kindle as much to do reading simply because getting the highlights was such a pain. Now the fact that this does it, I’m really excited. After I capture the information, then I organize it.
Once I have the note into Evernote, I then move the note to Zotero. Zotero is really the application I use to collect my academic research. I talked about Zotero and Episode ITC: 59. Please go check that out if you want to know more about Zotero, but as I’m moving my notes from Evernote to Zotero, what I’ll do is I’ll actually create separate notes for each of the book chapters and then add appropriate tags to each of those notes. This helps me isolate the notes when I need them and more quickly find the nuggets of information that I want when I’m doing the last part of this is sharing.
When I get out and get ready to share, I want to be able to find that information pretty quickly and Zotero just allows me to continuously collect information. It’s like my note card system. When it comes time to share, I think that’s an important part of the process, take what you learn and share it back out to others. I do this in the form of blog posts, podcast episodes like this or videos. I use what I read from books, articles, blog posts, podcasts in order to craft my content that I’m entering myself into this dialogue.
This also helps me remember it better, like I said, I’m part of this learning journey and so going out and seeing what others have to say and try to assimilate it into my processes and my thoughts it just helps me remember it. That is a quick overview of my learning journey and in an upcoming episode, I plan to share more of it, the ideas seek, sense, and share. I’ll talk a little bit more of how I’ve done that in the past and how I continue to do it but Readwise is now becoming very much an important tool to that process.
I’m really happy so far from what I’ve just seen about what Readwise can do. As I noted, I slowed down on my reading on a Kindle because it was such a pain to export those notes. Because of Readwise and also because I have a smaller house, I can’t just keep buying paper books, I’m going to have to do more on my Kindle. I will be spending more time reading online or reading through a digital device. I think Readwise can help you take your reading and learning to the next level. I would encourage you to definitely go check it out. Speaking of encouraging you to check things out, here’s a quick plug for my book, Read to Succeed.