Show HN: Readwise – Review and retain your Kindle highlights | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Readwise – Review and retain your Kindle highlights

readwise.io

90 pointstristanho32 comments

Hey HN,

As self-proclaimed bibliomaniacs, we were pained by how hard it was to revisit and organize our highlights. It would often feel like we'd read a book, have phenomenal new insights, and start to build some mental models, only to forget them a couple months later.

Readwise is a simple way to get lightweight spaced-repetition of the best ideas from the books you've read. Kindle was the largest and most accessible ecosystem, so we started with it. Curious if HN has any other methods of importing passages that could be useful to you!

Zoomed out, our goal is to dramatically improve the age-old practice of reading books for wisdom, both through faster[0] reading and better retention. We have quite a few ideas on how we're going to do this, but would love to know what you think.

[0] or slower, depending on the book/chapter

Glad you are working on this! I've been pretty disappointed at how non-standardized highlights (and comments) are for ebooks. Taking notes, highlighting, and 'active reading' are generally worse on electronic platforms and the potential to be have easier access to my generated content initially seemed to compensate for that... until I realized that I couldn't sync it up at all and none of the formats seemed to be compatible.

That said, I have avoided Amazon entirely and am not particularly interested in the spaced repetition aspect so I won't be signing up just yet. Would love to hear if/when you support Calibre, Kobo, and/or Moon Reader.

Thanks ropeladder :) Calibre, Kobo and Moon Reader are all on the list!

Any chance for KO Reader? I think it has a native sync solution already, but I haven't tried setting it up.

Added KO to our list too (damn, this is list is getting long...)

I dig it! Like reliving all the good moments from a great book. I think it would change the way I highlight stuff, from references to more memories. Providing a good memorable overview.

This is great to see, I'm glad that there's a market for this and that it's something that interests people. I have been working on a similar type of tool for the past year or so https://vocabifyapp.com

Good luck with yours and all the best!

Looks pretty cool.

Actually the only thing stopping me from signing up was that because rediscovering highlights was so terrible on kindle, I stopped higlighting years ago. It's an interesting chicken and egg problem you have to solve. Good Luck

Hey I like this idea. Last week I made a thing to help parse your kindle highlights and notes (using 'My Clippings.txt' file, not Amazon APIs) https://github.com/gobengo/kindle-web-annotations

It converts them to W3C Web Annotation Vocabulary JSON https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-vocab/

I hope to make an HTML renderer for these (and any Web Annotation objects) in the next couple weeks.

This looks pretty cool!

What's the business model going to be? The ToU are quite far-reaching regarding user content: "By submitting User Content through the Services, you hereby do and shall grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, edit, modify, truncate, aggregate, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit the User Content".

Also, are there other ways to browse, search, etc., the highlights in addition to the daily email?

Good question! We modelled our TOS off others around the web, and I believe that term was somewhat standard. I agree it's quite aggressive though -- we're going to look into modifying it.

For our business model, in the short term, we currently recommend one highlight from a book you _don't_ own in each daily email. The recommendation is based on not just what books you read, but how much you engaged with each book, which has lead it to be surprisingly prescient. We could potentially pursue affiliate links with that.

In the medium term, we expect to offer some premium features (such as Export your highlights to Evernote), which we'll likely charge for.

The product is still nascent when it comes to the web app and browsing through your highlights, but you can check out readwise.io/library to browse all of your books, or readwise.io/dashboard more broadly :)

I currently manually copy highlights and notes to Evernote (one note per book). It's way painful. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for that functionality. Will sign up when I get to a real computer.

I've been using https://www.clippings.io/ for years and have been very happy with their excellent Chrome Extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clippingsio-for-ki...

At first glances readwise seems underwhelming compared to clippings.io, am I missing something?

Clippings.io is a great tool for easily exporting Kindle highlights to Evernote, which is quite valuable to many users! We love what you've done, but we're going in a different direction. Thanks for taking the time to create a profile to share this feedback with us.

Think you might be interested in checking out https://apps.ankiweb.net/ for expansion ideas!

Thanks for doing this - this seems like a very good addition to improve the retention of the information intake for books. At least for me - I've noticed that resurfacing what matters to me within a quite short timeframe after reading it, definitely improves how easy (or hard) I find to apply the key takeaways of a book after I've read it.

Tried to sign-up using Amazon, but got an HTTP 500 in the auth callback: /accounts/amazon/login/callback/

Hey stpe! Sorry about this -- our site seems to be acting up under this HN traffic. We're looking at it right now and we'll have it fixed soon!

Edit: We're back! Sorry about that. Actually seems to have been an upstream issue with Amazon's oauth.

> To finish the signup process, you'll need to be on a computer and using Google Chrome or Safari. Sorry about that!

I really wish you would have told me that before I supplied access to my amazon account.

Also, why in the world does this need to be an extension? Giving you permissions on both my amazon account and my browser is an awful lot of purview for an organising my e-book highlights...

Hey jszym, that's our bad. We do mention the extension being required on our landing page (below the fold), but we definitely could make it more clear. Thanks for raising it to our attention.

If you like, I can purge our db of your Amazon auth -- all we get is your name and email from the amazon login.

We need the extension because, unfortunately, Amazon doesn't provide a Kindle API. The extension is used to let you export your highlights from Amazon's cloud easily.

Have you considered packaging the Chrome extension as a WebExtension for Firefox?

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Po...

This looks pretty cool. I’d rather use this than maintain my mess of selenium scripts I was using for this purpose.

Hey, thank you for the product, I will be using it regularly.

One feature request though: I'd like to use Readwise as my "central dump of highlights," but not every highlight I have is in my Kindle, it would be nice if it allowed to manually insert highlights I find elsewhere (e.g website, physical book).

Very cool! I'm always bummed when I read a cool book and forget nearly everything after a couple of months (especially info dense books). Thought about taking notes on paper but this is way better, though I wouldn't want the daily mail.

Thanks hypercluster! Why wouldn't you want the daily email? Not the right medium?

Super interesting, I did a small tool for myself for this same purpose. Is a mix between highlights and Evernote https://kintrospect.com/

This is cool, but most of the books on my Kindle don't come from Amazon so the highlights aren't synced online. I would like a version of this that just works on the kindle's myclippings.txt file.

This tool will parse your local My Clippings file to JSON: https://github.com/maxhallinan/my-clippings-to-json

We're on it spookyuser! Probably the next import method we look at.

I've been waiting for this service my whole life! What a great idea.

I suspect this is mainly for Amazon-bought books with highlights stored on Amazon's servers right? Or does this also work with notes made on side-loaded books?

That is indeed correct. We currently only support importing your highlights synced with Amazon's cloud.

It's totally possible to also allow you sync with the notes from books on your device, but the UX is a bit worse -- you've got to physically plugin your device. That being said, it's on our todo list!

I would be very excited for this when the notes are synced from non-amazon books, as most of mine are not purchased through amazon.

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