Reading DRM-Free EPUBs in MarginNote for iPad
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Reading DRM-Free EPUBs in MarginNote for iPad
As I recently shared on an episode of MacStories Unwind with John, I’ve been (slowly) reading Carl Sagan’s excellent Cosmos and highlighting interesting passages and quotes from the book. I’ve always liked to highlight, store, and try to remember what I read in books as I want to make sure there’s value to be extracted from the time I spend reading; with a collection of highlights, I can easily refer back to a fascinating fact without having to find the chapter and page inside the books manually. But there’s a problem: as I’ve also shared on AppStories, none of the popular eBook readers available on iPhone and iPad, including Apple’s Books app, are optimized for notes and highlights. Sure, they let you save and share highlights, but when it comes to managing, organizing, and retrieving them for personal research purposes, their feature set is effectively non-existent.
Earlier this week, after I started reading Sönke Ahrens’s How to Take Smart Notes (which was long overdue and prompted by Andy Matuschak’s incredible notes), I realized it was time to fix this and come up with an alternative system for highlighting text in books and saving notes alongside them. I don’t know if the workflow I’ve created is going to stick around forever (the more I read about Matuschak’s approach to notes and other Zettelkasten-inspired systems, the more I’m learning toward just building everything in Craft), but it’s working well right now for non-fiction books I need to annotate, and I wanted to share what I’ve done with Club members.