I like to take notes and mark highlights when I am reading, as I have talked about here. The paper book and pen is good for this. With online reading, Amazon kindle does an awesome job of allowing us to highlight and take notes and very nicely offers the kindle.amazon.com – Your Highlights service to access those highlights. Add to this the excellent Bookcision bookmarklet and you can download those highlights – a file per book – into your computer in JSON, XML and plain text.
Well, I also read a lot of books on Scribd – I like their collection of books and think their subscription is of good value. But I had been frustrated at the lack of so basic a functionality (at least for me) as notes and highlights. As of 2015, Scribd allows notes and highlights – however, they are trapped in the cloud. And there is no way of looking at all your notes and highlights in one page.
So I took the inspiration from Bookcision and wrote a bookmarklet – Exifile to release your Scribd highlights – in text and JSON format out of the cloud. And here it is for everyone to use – https://www.oddumbrella.com/exifile/
So give it a try and tell me what you think.
February 28, 2016