The lede is buried in that episode description and the show notes!
Good episode!
I just returned to Obsidian after 10 months of doing everything in DevonThink. Now @MacSparky is tempting me with Notion and other folks are tempting me with Capacities. David, have you given up on Obsidian entirely?
Note to MacSparky and @ismh86 : I’d love to see an episode on Notion, Capacities and other non-Obsidian note-taking systems. Before I get too settled in to Obsidian, it would probably pay for me to investigate alternatives.
On the question of saving Markdown to Word: That’s exactly my situation at work, and I’m afraid I have never found a satisfactory solution.
There’s a command-line tool called Pandoc, but it requires customization and that seems like too much work to me. However, folks with more programming skills than me seem to find that customization easy.
Like Stephen suggests, I have found Marked 2 to be unsatisfactory. Marked 3 is coming and Brett is working on building in more powerful DOCX export.
My current system is to simply use the preview tool available in the Markdown editors that I use (DevonThink, Obsidian, Drafts). The preview tools hide Markdown code and show documents in their formatted form. I copy-and-paste the text from the preview window into Word, and then take a few minutes to adjust everything, changing fonts and manually converting headers.
And often it’s easier to just write in Word if I know the output will be Word.
+1
I’ve been retired a few years but I never found any program that could open a complex MS Word document perfectly, except MS Word.
With respect to “Read it Later”: My experience has pretty been that that is a misnomer and it should be “Don’t Read it Now”.
For several years now I have been using my DevonThink Inbox as the first stop. Throughout the week I save bookmarks (links), PDFs, some emails (as PDFs), etc. to the DT Inbox. On Sunday, I go through the Inbox and classify the items into a few group:
- It was a good idea at the time but I am not really interested. Toss it.
- Read it now and then toss it or file it somewhere in DT
- Just file it in DT for future reference
- Leave it in the inbox (I will look at it later or next Sunday, or I just can’t decide right now).
This has worked for me. The inbox doesn’t grow without bound so it is mostly working. Reason #1 helps keep things from getting out of hand.
I agree mostly with the read it later sentiment.
I used Instapaper as intended for a long time, like c. 2010-2022 ish. But I was swayed by Readwise Reader and have been mostly happy with all the bells and whistles thus far. (As an aside, and related to the e-ink discussion, I do miss Instapaper’s kindle integration. Still works apparently, and they also added other e-ink devices too.).
But even with Instapaper, and now with Readwise, I also suffer from making it a link graveyard. So to combat that, I turned to my favorite goal-tracking, commitment-making service, beeminder, They made an official Readwise connection a little while ago so now I have a “commitment device” to whittle down my reading list. I can say over the past 20 months or so, it has kept me honest and I’m down to about 25 articles in my Readwise account….down from almost 200. 
I set it up so that I have a “rate” I set to continuously cut down the number of articles in my Readwise inbox. So every time I add an article, I risk blowing my goal, and the accompanying small financial “sting”. This is beeminder’s premise and they have a lot written on their blog of the psychology of commitments….and it so happens that putting real money on the line is both a good reminder to stick to your goals and a decent business model.
I agree with the comments above, sometimes just a little time away from an article is all I need to realize I don’t actually need to read that. I can say with certainty I have not read all the 175+ articles I’ve archived in Readwise. But using beeminder helps me kind of budget my attention or just manage the information overload a little bit and keeps me honest as to wether or not I’m actually going to read that hot take article someday 
I will say it does help me filter what goes into Readwise, ideally, good meaty articles that are well written and worth my time.
I’ve taken a different route: Readwise Reader is reserved for ePubs, PDFs, and web articles that I’ve made a commitment to read because they are related to a project I’m actively pursuing. It’s the place for my intentional reading. (I consider knocking books off of my To Be Read list to be a project, so they go there too, even though I’m reading them for fun.)
GoodLinks is where I put things that have piqued my interest, but are optional: my life won’t be materially altered for the worse if I never get around to them. I declare read-it-later bankruptcy every six to nine months, close my eyes, delete everything I’ve put there, and start afresh.
One exception: all my email newsletters get forwarded to Readwise so I can delete them from my inbox and read them with attention later (and not as a way to procrastinate dealing with everything else that’s in my inbox …).
My “read it later strategy” is to not read it later. I have a very curated list of blog posts and newsletters that I direct to Readwise Reader. I scan through them and read the ones I’m interested in every morning as part of my morning routine.
If I’m researching a topic for a blog post, I read things that look relevant at the time I’m doing the research. If I anticipate using it, I’ll save it to my Readwise Reader archive with highlights or, more likely, just pull a couple of quotes (and the source) and add them to my MindNode mind map.
My impression is that most people who don’t have time to read things when they encounter them and send them to a read later location, also don’t have the time to read them later. 
The topic of reading ebooks vs analog books came up in this episode.
The over-enthusiasm of analog book evangelists sometimes makes others feel like they have to justify their choice to read ebooks. That’s not necessary.
It is a personal choice, and completely subjective. Either choice is valid. I don’t think it’s helpful to attempt to push your personal reading choice on others.
For those interested in the topic, last year I published a blog post about this: The Power of Ebooks: Debunking Myths and Highlighting Advantages
Good write-up. I completely agree. I would never go back to analog books. I have a complete seminary of books in Logos and hundreds of other digital books, fiction and non-fiction in the Kindle app. I take advantage of everything you mentioned, including Readwise.
You wrote:
This argument assumes that reading ebooks and taking notes about books are mutually exclusive. But of course, they are not. Nothing stops an ebook reader from making highlights and taking notes on a piece of paper or a digital device while reading an ebook.
I would like to point out that you can take digital notes directly within the E-book, as illustrated below. Once you’ve taken your notes, you can easily download them all and use them in various apps like DEVONthink or Obsidian. I do this regularly. I use the Kindle app, but I’m not sure what’s possible on other platforms.
I haven’t purchased a physical book in decades for many of the same reasons as you. And I have an acquaintance, that has written several books, that prefers physical books when a quiet room and deep study is needed.
But he also uses a kindle when traveling or for quick reading during commutes, etc. He sees advantages in both formats and doesn’t think it is a either/or choice.
You’re right. I’ve realized this since writing the post, but I don’t often take notes that way. I typically do higlights for Readwise, and use the notes function to string together highlights where one thought is broken up into separate locations, which results in one combined highlight in Readwise.
The reason I add the notes to the book is to ensure that I have them if I ever decide to stop using Readwise. There is likely a way to export those notes from Readwise, but I have not looked into that possibility.
Re: markdown to Word
Ulysses is also a good option. You can make custom export styles, and there are a variety of preformatted options to choose from.
And for going the other direction, from Word to markdown, my favorite trick is to drag the Word document into iA Writer
@MacSparky used the expression “a flock of stream decks” in this episode. I’ve always enjoyed the different group descriptors: a gaggle of geese, a resistance of crows, etc.
May I suggest “a performance of stream decks”?
I prefer physical books to ebooks any day. I’m not saying it’s better, but it is my preference. The advantage for me is I can remember where something is in the book or where I made a comment or highlight. I also find I often need to cross reference and in a physical book I can hold my position whilst quickly thumbing back a few pages or compare two pages quite easily. All this is rather cumbersome for me in ebooks and unless you have a dedicated reader the risk do being distracted digitally is far higher for me. Having been around for some time I also find having books in different formats and different apps frustrating. There’s also the risk in the kindle that you can lose highlights and annotations if a book update comes out and you update.
Agreed, and I would extend that to audio books. All are books. Book (whose ancestry etymological ancestry goes back to Beech as in Beech tree, because strips of bark were used for writing (mostly in runes) is really more like “container for words” than the assumption that book = codex printed and bound book.
Book was used for clay tablets, scrolls, manuscripts on vellum, and conventional bound and printed books.
I use printed, digital, and audio books. I do rely on printed books for scholarly citations, because they are specific in ways that ebook citations are not.
Did anyone catch the name or brand of folding keyboard that MacSparky uses for his iPhone when traveling?
I didn’t see a link in the show notes.
Not sure if it’s what he has but I have this one and it gets the job done.