I have been working on a project that has long sat on my list. I am finally getting started on it.
Over several hours, I downloaded all of the highlights and notes from my Kindle library into DEVONthink as OCRed PDFs. I now maintain three databases:
All highlights and notes from my digital books
All other research materials: PDFs, webpages, excerpts, and related documents
An index of all prior writing and presentations
My task now is to classify and cross-link this material by topic. This will be an incremental and lengthy process. I suspect DEVONthink’s classifying function or its AI agent could assist with this work, but I have not yet determined how to connect my AI accounts to DT.
Nevertheless, once complete, I will have an integrated repository of information to inform future writing and presentations. Even in its incomplete state, this resource is invaluable. Previously, this information resided in Kindle, Amazon, and scattered iCloud folders: fragmented and therefore far less useful than it might have been.
You might have mentioned this in a different post, but do you happen to know if DEVONthink can access Apple Books highlights without an external tool? I did a quick look at their support site, but didn’t see it.
Certainly. You need to log in to your account, then go to: \https://read.amazon.com/notebook. You will be taken to a page with all of your Kindle books on the left. Click on one, and then you’ll see your highlights and notes on the right.
I added all the PDFs to DEVONthink for several reasons, but one of them is that DT automatically OCRs the PDFs when imported. This feature allows me to search across all the highlights and notes from my books. Additionally, I can create Smart Groups in DT for specific topics.
Like Barrett pointed it out, you can get them on your Amazon account. Also, some software like Readwise can automatically get them for you. There is even an Obsidian plugin that imports them automatically in Obsidian.
You can also scan into Apple Notes the text on the Kindle’s screen using your iPhone camera. That’s what I do.
“(…) to classify and cross-link this material by topic. This will be an incremental and lengthy process. (…)”
@Bmosbacker, I don’t have the technical expertise to answer your question, but I suffer from a “kind of” similar pain: the need to classify and cross-link by topic vast amounts of text, from different sources and periods of time, in a resilient private system and workflow.
I wonder which tools lawyers use nowadays to process and make sense of vast ammounts of concepts and information from different sources - certainly DEVONthink is one of these powerful tools.
Atlas.ti also appears to be very powerful for automatically organizing concepts and making sense of vast amounts of text - even if scattered among many sources.
I haven’t tried Atlas.ti yet - I just heard about it and became very curious (specially because it seems to consolidate a single “live index of concepts” across different sources, which really impressed me). Have you used Atlas.ti, and if so, could you please share your experience?
(Sorry for not answering your specific question. I’m also curious to know more about your workflows with DEVONThink).
I have not tried Atlas.ti, but I will check it out. One way to consider handling this is to index folders in a DEVONthink database and use something like Claude Cowork to handle classification and create an index. I have used Claude more frequently since my original post. Though I have not used Cowork for classification, I have used it for reorganizing thousands of files. It did an admirable job. I suspect that Cowork can be used for classification purposes and for creating a linkable index as a starting point. Since the index would show up in DEVONthink (if you index and do not import your files), you could end up with the best of both worlds.
Note, I am using “index” in two ways: 1) indexing files in Finder to DEVONthink, and 2) creating a master index file based on topic classifications. I suspect that Cowork could even create links between the files, but again, I have not yet tried this.
Thank you so much for your generosity in sharing your workflow, @Bmosbacker.
I’m almost “as late as Apple” on the AI side of things, but I hope to fix that soon.
Here is the video through which I discovered ATLASti recently. (The video is from 2023, but it describes an interesting workflow of a PhD student). (ATLASti appears at 12’26”)
Using Atlas.ti to track the subjects or general content of documents in DEVONthink or other libraries is possible, but not the designed purpose of the software.
Yikes! Atlas.ti is eye-wateringly expensive if you’re not a student or an educator at a degree granting institution: $722 per annum for a single-seat license.
I think I’ll stick with Claude + DEVONthink and my LLM Wikis.
