I won't go into Instapaper's readability capabilities (e.g.

If you're getting impatient, you can skip straight to my comparison table. I'm going to review some of the tools I tried using and still using and highlight their different positive and negative aspects. you can populate your TODO list and step up your spaced repetition game.it serves as activity log if you are into #lifelogging.Fiction books are not an exception: I tend to highlight use of language I liked, inspirational things, etc. If I don't have any highlights, it probably means that the content was not interesting at all for me. it's got social value if highlights are visible to other people (e.g.it's easier to recommend content to other people because you can refer to specific moments or points you liked/disliked.If I have annotations for that, I can quickly go through them and restore the context. In particular, often I'd run on something on the internet that I remember reading before. It's easier to recall the content I already read, I just skim through highlights and refresh the memory the very act of spending conscious effort on highlighting and commenting helps to remember better.I've become increasingly obsessed with this and these days ability to highlight when I read serves multiple purposes for me: That bothered me increasingly until I bought a Kindle which had 'highlight' functionality and virtual keyboard and I had discovered it to help a lot with recalling. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details.Īt some point in my life I realized I didn't remember most of the books/papers/posts/videos I had consumed few years before.įor brevity I'll just refer to all of this as 'content' further on I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/ spaced repetition items. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools.

TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read.

Instapaper vs pocket 2017