The latest iOS update for the Readwise app added a feature that intelligently extracts real highlights we make in books with OG highlighters. It’s the first app I’ve found that does that, and it does a very good job at it.
It also makes a pretty good attempt at capturing marginalia (notes in the margin), and figuring out what page the highlight is on – and added both of these as notes on the scanned highlight.
Katie
We’ve come a long way since the days of blowing into Nintendo cartridges to get them to work.
Amazing feature.
Nice; that’s something I’ve long wanted. I don’t mark up many physical books, but I do it a lot when I print papers/essays/occasional entire books.
I wonder how well it would handle highlighting in an ereader/reading app. Then I wouldn’t have to integrate it, for lighter usage.
Challenge accepted!
I tried this with a highlighted PDF in my reMarkable. It worked just fine. Readwise selected the highlight quickly – very quickly in fact. Probably because the e-reader page is very flat and the type crisp, which is not always the case with a book whose page I’m trying to hold flat while I image the page with the app.
Katie
This is great news because Readwise is going to be my central repository the dozens of books I have to get through
I’ve backed off from using Readwise to scan highlights manually added to books. I was getting a less than 50% success rate. The feature needs more work on Readwise’s behalf.
Since Claude is very good at extracting highlights from photos of book pages, and a lot faster than Readwise, I designed a highlighter skill with Claude, which gives me a more usable result than Readwise did.
Katie