Notes, Highlights, and Marginalia: From E-books to Online

For several years now, I’ve been meaning to do something more interesting with the notes, highlights, and marginalia from the various books I read. In particular, I’ve specifically been meaning to do it for the non-fiction I read for research, and even more so for e-books, which tend to have slightly more extract-able notes given their electronic nature. This fits in to the way in which I use this site as a commonplace book as well as the IndieWeb philosophy to own all of one’s own data.[1]

Over the past month or so, I’ve been experimenting with some fiction to see what works and what doesn’t in terms of a workflow for status updates around reading books, writing book reviews, and then extracting and depositing notes, highlights, and marginalia online. I’ve now got a relatively quick and painless workflow for exporting the book related data from my Amazon Kindle and importing it into the site with some modest markup and CSS for display. I’m sure the workflow will continue to evolve (and further automate) somewhat over the coming months, but I’m reasonably happy with where things stand.

The fact that the Amazon Kindle allows for relatively easy highlighting and annotation in e-books is excellent, but having the ability to sync to a laptop and do a one click export of all of that data, is incredibly helpful. Adding some simple CSS to the pre-formatted output gives me a reasonable base upon which to build for future writing/thinking about the material. In experimenting, I’m also coming to realize that simply owning the data isn’t enough, but now I’m driven to help make that data more directly useful to me and potentially to others.

As part of my experimenting, I’ve just uploaded some notes, highlights, and annotations for David Christian’s excellent text Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History[2] which I read back in 2011/12. While I’ve read several of the references which I marked up in that text, I’ll have to continue evolving a workflow for doing all the related follow up (and further thinking and writing) on the reading I’ve done in the past.

I’m still reminded me of Rick Kurtzman’s sage advice to me when I was a young pisher at CAA in 1999: “If you read a script and don’t tell anyone about it, you shouldn’t have wasted the time having read it in the first place.” His point was that if you don’t try to pass along the knowledge you found by reading, you may as well give up. Even if the thing was terrible, at least say that as a minimum. In a digitally connected era, we no longer need to rely on nearly illegible scrawl in the margins to pollinate the world at a snail’s pace.[4] Take those notes, marginalia, highlights, and meta data and release it into the world. The fact that this dovetails perfectly with Cesar Hidalgo’s thesis in Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies,[3] furthers my belief in having a better process for what I’m attempting here.

Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll be able to add similar data to several other books I’ve read and reviewed here on the site.

If anyone has any thoughts, tips, tricks for creating/automating this type of workflow/presentation, I’d love to hear them in the comments!

Footnotes

[1]
“Own your data,” IndieWeb. [Online]. Available: http://indieweb.org/own_your_data. [Accessed: 24-Oct-2016]
[2]
D. Christian and W. McNeill H., Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 2011.
[3]
C. Hidalgo, Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies, 1st ed. Basic Books, 2015.
[4]
O. Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2004.

Published by

Chris Aldrich

I'm a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, IndieWeb, theoretical mathematics, and big history. I'm also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.

19 thoughts on “Notes, Highlights, and Marginalia: From E-books to Online”

  1. Shameless plug: I wrote a bit about how I’m exporting and sharing my highlights: https://medium.com/@sawyerh/how-i-m-exporting-my-highlights-from-the-grasps-of-ibooks-and-kindle-ce6a6031b298

    It’s a bit over-engineered, but I do plan on making a more user-friendly way of doing this on your own in the future, in case you’re interested.

    via Medium.com

    1. Yes, surely there has to be an easier way to do all of this, and surely more than two of us see the problem. 

      One thing that I can think of may be to potentially integrate something like the new micropub spec from the W3C into a more far-reaching solution: You might potentially take the email portion and instead of the other triggers, have Lambda create a micropub push to your site. With just a small amount of code you could add a micropub endpoint to your site and authorize Lambda to publish to it.

      The potential benefit of doing this is that you could create an inexpensive service to do this for multiple platforms. I believe there are micropub plugins written for several CMSs (including notably WordPress) which then allows a broader “readership” (pun intended). If a user can send an email to a service, install a plugin and authenticate, it doesn’t get too much easier. Certainly more interesting than https://www.clippings.io/, which seems to be one of the very few apps left in this area.

      As an aside, I know there’s a fairly big contingent in the IndieWeb community who are interested in static sites and Siteleaf sounds like an excellent CMS for that kind of use. 

      IndieWeb also has some interesting collections of post-types, UI/UX, information, and code relating to some of these highlighting, notes/annotation types for web. There’s certainly a better bridge between books (especially ebooks) and the web:

      Syndicated copies:

    2. I’m curious if anything simpler or more modular ultimately evolved out of this?

      Syndicated copies:

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