Introducing Book-Notes – my notes and highlights from the books I have read

Today I’m releasing Book-Notes – a collection of my notes and highlights from the books I have read.

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Reading a book is awesome. Blazing past books at break-neck speed is awesome for only so long. To enjoy the book more, to internalize and chew over what the book has to say, I realized that slowing down and reviewing might be key. So, I started marking out highlights and taking notes when reading inspired by folks like Derek Sivers, Ryan Holiday, Maria Popova (listen at the 31:45 mark) and Tim Ferriss.

This taking notes and highlights is convenient and easy when reading an e-book: on a kindle or the kindle app, or on the Google Play Books app. If I’m reading a paper book, I use the index method: I lightly mark the start and end of the highlight on the page and create an index on the very first page of the book. The index is just a list of page numbers which has these highlights and maybe notes.

I download the Kindle highlights from the Kindle – Your Highlights page using Bookcision. When reading on Play books, it stores the notes on a Google Doc in my Google Drive. Paper books are slower/harder/better/nicer/more-painful. I write down the marked highlights and erase the pencil markings as I go) into my Livescribe book – which gets transcribed and then moved to OneNote.

And now, these notes converted to JSON and will start appearing on the book-notes section of my website.

So, if you are interested in what I’m reading, what I think is thought-provoking in the books I read, come back here regularly to check for new notes and highlights (and some older ones which are being transcribed).

What I used to build book-notes

I used React – using Create React App to build book-notes. It is hosted on my shared hosting space at Webhosting Hub. The code lives in Bitbucket. The design is heavily inspired by Derek Sivers and the Kindle – Your Highlights page. Fonts used: the serif Alegreya for body copy and and the sans-serif Gandhi Sans for headers. Logo is from Flaticon.