Where does Readwise Reader store your content? Do you have to upload your epubs and PDFs to its own servers?
Yes to the epubs. I keep my own copies locally but I do have t oupload them to their system to get the reader app annotations in there. It’s a mark of how much I like their annotation abilities that I am willing to actually put stuff out in their cloud. Everyone here knows how anti-cloud I am.
I only use the reader all to handle annotating clipped web articles and imported EPUB books. I don’t use RSS feeds nor do I use it to archive twitter threads or any of the other things it does.
I don’t even use it as a read-it-later app. My primary use case is to replace the Kindle app on my iPad because I can read, annotate and reference books bought from sources other than Amazon in the same way. With the Kindle app I can only annotate books bought from Amazon and there are annotation limits that I can’t see a way around. Also the app versions do not have the kindle.clippings file of the actual kindle devices so I can’t use that as a way to access my annotations easily.
I do not use it for PDFs. I use Highlights for PDF files and connect to Zotero awith Zotfile since my PDFs are almost all scientific paepers and I need full bibliographic info with them.
What’s great is that even though the stuff is on their servers, because I am syncing my annotations with Obsidian, I get all my annotations down into my control so even if they go away sicne I keep my source material on my own hard drive and my annotations also come down to my hard drive.
The only potential glitch is articles I clip from a web site are still stuck in their system. I have asked for a download option for those so I can keep all my sources locally. Ther eare a few other things I do not like. If I edit the downlaoded notes in Obsidian those edits are not then synced back to reader and that is a real problem. But Iv’e been told that not many people do that. So if that would be useful please go ask for it as an enhancement!
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No, it’s not the profile thing…it’s about establishing a household and enabling the family library. I haven’t double checked the steps in this, but I found this on a quick search:
Good catch…that’s a pretty laborious process though to exclude book-by-book. But if it works, it’s a solution!
morning / afternoon / evening all. Just to say that Readwise Reader most definitely has it hooks in me. Surprisingly enjoy Readwise daily review, but it’s having various types of materials in Reader that is ideal for me: PDFs, epubs, websites, blogs. There’s a slightly danger in not being able to choose what to be reading (and the danger perhaps in not getting to the longer-form materials) but that seems to be fine for now. The software feels slick (running on Safari on Mac and native app on iOS) for sure. I think ideally for me it wouldn’t upload the materials to its own servers so that instead I could keep, say, original PDFs on my machine and have highlights appear there (say if stored in dropbox).
So thanks everyone for your input. Hope your January is going well.
Cheers
Simon
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Readwise Reader is a joy.
It feels like the team have worked through a long list of problems which made me dissatisfied with legacy read-later products (Instapaper, Pocket etc) fixed them all, and then found more ways to make the proposition useful & delightful.
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