Tease away—and if you’re ever worried about offending me, don’t be. I try to stay laid back and hard to offend.
As for subscriptions, I’m certainly willing to pay for one if it adds real value—hence, I’m happy with Readwise. That said, there are plenty of apps I could benefit from, but I’ve intentionally chosen not to subscribe. At present, aside from bundled services like Apple One, I only subscribe to four apps: Readwise, ExpressVPN, Backblaze, and Microsoft—though the last is purely out of necessity.
The screenshot of my iPad dock reflects roughly 95% of the apps I use to get my work done.
Bottom line: I protect my bottom line by keeping subscriptions to a minimum.
I use a combination of iA Writer (for writing, macOS and iOS) and Obsidian (for organizing and viewing, macOS only). They work together perfectly. iA Writer’s iCloud folder serves as the Obsidian vault. This arrangement allows me to access all notes on iPad without dealing with Obsidian’s clunky mobile app.
I don’t use Obsidian community plugins because I’m not in the import-export business… yet. Basic Obsidian, with only core plugins, is good enough for my needs.
My notes are organized into a slightly modified Zettel scheme, for the purpose of maximum wikilink effectiveness. UIDs for fleeting notes. Semantic names and aliases for permanent notes. No daily notes because the UID already includes the date.
Resurfacing is done via wikilinks, unlinked mentions, and an Apple Shortcut that opens a random note last modified between X and Y weeks ago. I don’t use spaced repetition because forgetting is actually a blessing in the Digital Age.
This is just one of the many good approaches to note-taking.
Inoreader is HANDS DOWN the best RSS service out there. It’s for power users and has so many more features than Feedly. This year they did a special during BF for 18 months for $90. During BF is the only time they have the specials, so I recommend waiting. If the price goes up again, I’ll stop subscribing and go with News Explorer 2 & iCloud Sync.
I highly suggest you at least try Inoreader Pro. I absolutely loathe their developers (from Bulgaria). They are hostile to their user base, but unfortunately they have the best RSS product out there. There’s such too many reasons it’s superior to Feedly.
That’s a great idea to wait for BF. I’ve had the free Inoreader account for years so I’ll see what they offer this year. Until then I think i’m going to move off of Feedly and support Ron with NE2 (I didn’t even know it released 6 months ago but now with the 2.1 version it’s probably ready to hop in)
I means something when someone tells me they loathe a product but it’s just too good to not use. Brings me back to the nostalgic Quark Express days.
I have 2 more years of inoreader left. If Inoreader doesn’t do a special this year and my 2 year sub elapses and they cost more than $5 a month, I’ll transition to News Explorer. Hopefully v3 or v4 is released by then.
After my Inoreader trial I plan on subscribing for a year and see where that goes. I was initially planning on perhaps subscribing to Readwise especially given their educational pricing of 50 dollars IIRC but after perusing YouTubeLand i’m testing out Recall.AI and it’s looking promising. I think my goal is to have my Mac repository bet contained within Devonthink and augment that with a SAAS solution. With Devonthink’s new licensing I can renew every 18 months and have a layer of redundancy with the SAAS solution. If Inoreader can leverage some AI to supercharge their filtering then they’d be worth keeping an annual sub to.
I also use Readwise Reader due to your number 1 and 2. My use is basically all books and PDF scientific papers and I use my iPad for all of that.
I wish for a lot of things to improve it but the one I keep harping on is a true round trip of all highlights and notes to and from Obsidian. I can get them al in there but if I edit or make corrections or add stuff in Obsidian I don’t see it back in Reader and that is a PITA.
I’ve never gotten into RSS readers at all and I don’t subscribe to any feeds. Anything that I see in my web wandering that I may want to read gets clipped using the Obsidian web clipper tool and it goes into a clippings folder in my Obsidian inbox folder. Periodically I cull out stuff that is no longer interesting or that I’ve decided I don’t want to read, or that is a read and forget item. The others I annotate and link the item into my system. From there the note moves to my Reference folder in my vault.
I’ve said this before, but the Obsidian web clipper is really, really terrific. You can set up pre-defined templates specifying things like the properties fields you want to include, which vault and folder you want to save the item to, etc etc etc. AND you can edit the resulting markdown file before it gets ported to Obsidian, which is really useful if you want to cut extraneous links or images from the text before saving, or confirm that what you want to save makes it into the file.
I use it all the time for things that I know for sure I need to read and save. (I’d be happier using it as a RIL tool if the iOS app was better at syncing.) Lately I’ve been using it to capture items I want to upload to NotebookLM. I love NotebookLM, but I don’t like the way it parses PDFs and webpages. It does handle markdown files beautifully, however, so I feed it markdown files whenever I can.
I’ve tried Readwise a couple of times. I’m not sure about the obsession with collecting highlights - who actually does anything meaningful with them anyway? It’s a novelty to see the daily email, but that wears thin after a week or so.
Read a book for the fun of it. Enjoy the experience. You don’t have to collect the best highlights to prove your intelligence. That’s not the game.
I wouldn’t presume to speak for others, but I make good use of the highlights. When a passage from a book or PDF resurfaces in Readwise—something I read some time ago and had forgotten—I often find myself incorporating a direct quote or paraphrase into an article I’m writing, the book I’m working on, a speech, or a devotional. I also tag and categorize the highlight in DEVONthink for easier retrieval and recall.
Just the other day, for example, the following highlighted text appeared in Readwise:
Courage, bravery, fortitude, honor, sacrifice . . . Temperance, self-control, moderation, composure, balance . . . Justice, fairness, service, fellowship, goodness, kindness . . . Wisdom, knowledge, education, truth, self-reflection, peace . . . These are the key to a life of honor, of glory, of excellence in every sense.
The highlight is from Discipline is Destiny—one I had long forgotten but will likely use in the book or a presentation.
In short, Readwise helps resurface information that would otherwise be forgotten.
You don’t have to collect the best highlights to prove your intelligence.
I certainly agree. Still, it’s a helpful way to reinforce learning.
With books that I’m reading for fun, this is exactly right — though even in this case, I occasionally highlight something that stands out to me. It’s fun to see those things pop up in the daily review.
But honestly, I don’t do the daily review regularly. My use case is different: I’m often reading for purposes of research or teaching. For those books and articles, I take advantage of Readwise’s ability to add chapters.
I sync my highlights to Craft, where Readwise’s chapter marking and highlighting process gives me an outline of the book or article, with highlights and notes in the appropriate section.
That gives me a great start for making further notes, developing ideas, making class plans, etc.
Readwise is one of my most valuable tools, for all the reasons you list.
And I too recently discovered the AI tool that lets me find related highlights. I’m using it almost every time I’m preparing a blog post, most of which are promped by Readwise highlights in the first place.
The spaced and random repetition is so helpful. When I read things and highlight them, I may not be “ready” to write about the topic. But after more reading and life experience, suddenly I find a highlight extremely relevant and I’m motivated to write about it. Or just think more about it.
My experience with my PKM system (and I’m guessing most people) is that the vast majority of its contents will never be reviewed again. Readwise helps to alleviate the ‘archieving death’ of what I’ve read by bringing it to my attention even years later. That’s invaluable.
I’ve been reducing my subscriptions over time, but Readwise isn’t even on the consideration list. It’s value to me far exceeds the cost.
