I use my phone a lot to capture book highlights. The Readwise iPhone app is really clunky and old-schoolish. Before going down the rabbit hole looking for other options, I am asking here for suggestions. My process is read, highlight, capture highlights, currently – upload to Readwise account, then sync with Obsidian. If there’s a better way that also makes Readwise unnecessary, my ears are open.
Katie
Omnivore is good for a free option. Has good text to speech if you want that. You can sync highlights or entire articles to Obsidian. iPhone app looks good and the web app is fine, theres a good mac app and browser extension as well. https://omnivore.app/
Looks good so far! Thanks for the tip! 
Thanks for the Omnivore recommendations. I really like the Highlight feature. I also like that it is a “sort of” RSS reader. Let’s see if it can replace Unread, which is my current favourite. Unread doesn’t have Highlight and sometimes I end up using NewsBlur to do it so it became a mess. I’d gladly go for an open source alternative that also looks good!!
me: Apple books (read&highlight) + ibook obsidian plugin (capture&import)
Thanks @ackii
I should have been clearer in my post – I am working with analog books, not digital instances of books. There is great joy in annotation and writing marginalia while having a dialog with a paper book – far more fun than with Kindle. Then I hit the slog of digitizing the stuff.
Katie
Thank you @pagr.
Omnivore is not for books. It is for digital articles and feeds. I’m looking to replace Readwise’s iPhone app for selecting text in physical paper books. Sorry, I thought I specified that, but probably not clearly.
Katie
I like Readwise enough that I’ve not explored too many other options. I did download this app Highlighted once and found it ok, but since it didn’t sync to Readwise I haven’t kept up with it.
When scanning parts of books that don’t go into readwise, I use either vFlat or Drafts. Drafts makes it super easy to get text from a page, delete the stuff you don’t need and edit accordingly, then send it off to wherever it needs to go. vFlat is not so fast and easy, but good for capturing multiple pages and flattening the curves of an open book.
Apologies, I only just noticed that you said an app for books at the end.
Absolutely! I use Drafts all the time to capture analogue text; trim, highlight, or annotate it as needed; and port it into Obsidian. It’s fast, straightforward, and accurate.
PS: This workflow makes it easy to add whatever information you need for a proper citation.
You can use screvi. It has similar features with a modern UI but focuses on having an instagram-like feed, instead of daily reviews
Very late reply, but as I just came across the thread: I can recommend Highlighted. It’s easy to use and free. Books can be added by scanning the barcode. Highlights can be easily exported for further use, i.e as citations. My only point of criticism: It’s not possible to enter the page numbers for a highlight spanning two pages, as the field for the page number accepts no dash. My workaround is to enter them with a zero between the two numbers and correct it after export (I only use the app for capture and then import the highlights in Roam Research).
I capture book highlights with Apple notes on my iPhone, and it then syncs automatically with Apple notes on my Mac
For future readers, Omnivore no longer exists.
@walden789 @derekvan Are Highlighted and Drafts much better than using Apple Notes? How do they compare?
Drafts as a lot more options for “doing things” with the next of a note–like sending it to another app, processing the text in some way, using templates with the text, etc. Youtube has several good overview videos like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXDlKX0b8GI&t=22s
I work from two copies of a book: the print version, and the ebook. I read the print edition cover to cover, but when I want to highlight or annotate a passage, I pull out my phone and log the highlights/notes in the digital version. That way I keep my print books clean and have my digital notes in an indexable format.
The most cost efficient way I’ve found to do this is to borrow the digital book from my library using Libby, which has an export option for highlights and notes.
I use Drafts to process text that will eventually end up elsewhere because of the vast array of actions, syntaxes, and themes you can import from the action directory that make formatting and tidying up text quick and straightforward.
For instance, I often use Drafts to scan a passage of interest from a print book that I’m reading, which I can then directly import as OCR’d text and clean it with tools that do things like remove line breaks, empty lines, extra white space, etc etc etc.
Drafts also imports PDFs and converts them into editable, reflowable text with greater finesse than PDF Expert or Nitro PDF.
I don’t think of Notes as a tool for processing text into some desirable final format, although I haven’t worked with it for a while.
I hate doing this, so… sorry (in twenty five words or less):