Organize Your Highlights ✍️ — Wonder Tools

New ways to save things you want to remember, review and share

Welcome! Read on to discover how you can use digital highlighting sites and apps to more effectively save, remember and share things you read, listen to and watch. If someone forwarded this to you or you found it online, subscribe to join >5k free readers and get next Thursday’s post in your inbox.

You read thousands of words last week. How much of that do you remember? 🤔 By highlighting juicy tidbits, we make it easier for our future selves to return to — and reflect on — valuable passages. The highlighting tool I find most useful:

Readwise — The Master Tool for Highlighting

Readwise is my favorite tool for digital highlights. It serves as a repository for all my highlights from other services. I also use it to review, share and export highlights.

Readwise features 👍

• Highlight online articles Install the Readwise browser extension for Chrome or Firefox. Then highlight anything you reading online, right-click, and select “Save Highlight to Readwise.” Or, if you have the Readwise app for iOS or Android, select any text on your phone and share it to Readwise.

• Pull in ebook highlights Readwise can import all the highlights you’ve made in Kindle, Apple Books or Google Play Books. I like having access to all my favorite passages from across my ebooks in one place. You can add notes to any passage to add your own perspective to any highlight.

• Pull in saved passages from read-it-later services like Instapaper and Pocket.

• Grab highlights from print books Take a picture of a page in a book and then slide your finger over the text you want to digitize and save. If you’re on iOS and only read print books, I’d recommend Highlighted, detailed below.

• Import highlights from many other apps, PDFs—even podcast highlights from the Airr app, described below.

What you can do with your saved highlights

• Review your favorite passages Readwise can email you passages you’ve highlighted to reflect on. Or show you an assortment of past highlights on your phone. I like being able to search through sentences I’ve enjoyed in the past. You can also export them into your notes in Evernote, Notion or Roam.

• Export your favorite book passages Here’s an example of a Kindle highlight I shared about hobbies on Twitter with Readwise.

• Post highlights from online articles to social platforms Readwise creates a pretty version of any highlight tailored for social platforms. Here’s an example of a passage I highlighted about why to try to double your rate of failure:

  Jeremy Caplan @jeremycaplan

  On aiming to double failure rate - a counterintuitive but potentially useful objective for those of us who may otherwise be risk averse when it comes to experiments

  

Pricing: It’s free for 30 days to try out, then $4.50/month for basic features or $8/month for advanced features. If you’d prefer to avoid a new subscription, I’d recommend one of the apps below, all of which are free.

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Highlight Podcasts and Audio Books