
Show HN: Readwise – Review and retain your Kindle highlights - tristanho
https://readwise.io/?ref=hn
======
tristanho
Hey HN,

As self-proclaimed bibliomaniacs, we were pained by how hard it was to revisit
and organize our highlights. It would often feel like we'd read a book, have
phenomenal new insights, and start to build some mental models, only to forget
them a couple months later.

Readwise is a simple way to get lightweight spaced-repetition of the best
ideas from the books you've read. Kindle was the largest and most accessible
ecosystem, so we started with it. Curious if HN has any other methods of
importing passages that could be useful to you!

Zoomed out, our goal is to dramatically improve the age-old practice of
reading books for wisdom, both through faster[0] reading and better retention.
We have quite a few ideas on how we're going to do this, but would love to
know what you think.

[0] or slower, depending on the book/chapter

~~~
ropeladder
Glad you are working on this! I've been pretty disappointed at how non-
standardized highlights (and comments) are for ebooks. Taking notes,
highlighting, and 'active reading' are generally worse on electronic platforms
and the potential to be have easier access to my generated content initially
seemed to compensate for that... until I realized that I couldn't sync it up
at all and none of the formats seemed to be compatible.

That said, I have avoided Amazon entirely and am not particularly interested
in the spaced repetition aspect so I won't be signing up just yet. Would love
to hear if/when you support Calibre, Kobo, and/or Moon Reader.

~~~
tristanho
Thanks ropeladder :) Calibre, Kobo and Moon Reader are all on the list!

~~~
captn3m0
Any chance for KO Reader? I think it has a native sync solution already, but I
haven't tried setting it up.

~~~
tristanho
Added KO to our list too (damn, this is list is getting long...)

------
arthurjj
Looks pretty cool.

Actually the only thing stopping me from signing up was that because
rediscovering highlights was so terrible on kindle, I stopped higlighting
years ago. It's an interesting chicken and egg problem you have to solve. Good
Luck

------
gobengo
Hey I like this idea. Last week I made a thing to help parse your kindle
highlights and notes (using 'My Clippings.txt' file, not Amazon APIs)
[https://github.com/gobengo/kindle-web-
annotations](https://github.com/gobengo/kindle-web-annotations)

It converts them to W3C Web Annotation Vocabulary JSON
[https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-vocab/](https://www.w3.org/TR/annotation-
vocab/)

I hope to make an HTML renderer for these (and any Web Annotation objects) in
the next couple weeks.

------
thomas11
This looks pretty cool!

What's the business model going to be? The ToU are quite far-reaching
regarding user content: "By submitting User Content through the Services, you
hereby do and shall grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-
free, fully paid, sublicensable and transferable license to use, edit, modify,
truncate, aggregate, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of,
display, perform, and otherwise fully exploit the User Content".

Also, are there other ways to browse, search, etc., the highlights in addition
to the daily email?

~~~
tristanho
Good question! We modelled our TOS off others around the web, and I believe
that term was somewhat standard. I agree it's quite aggressive though -- we're
going to look into modifying it.

For our business model, in the short term, we currently recommend one
highlight from a book you _don't_ own in each daily email. The recommendation
is based on not just what books you read, but how much you engaged with each
book, which has lead it to be surprisingly prescient. We could potentially
pursue affiliate links with that.

In the medium term, we expect to offer some premium features (such as Export
your highlights to Evernote), which we'll likely charge for.

The product is still nascent when it comes to the web app and browsing through
your highlights, but you can check out readwise.io/library to browse all of
your books, or readwise.io/dashboard more broadly :)

~~~
murrayb
I currently manually copy highlights and notes to Evernote (one note per
book). It's way painful. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for that
functionality. Will sign up when I get to a real computer.

------
kindlelover
I've been using [https://www.clippings.io/](https://www.clippings.io/) for
years and have been very happy with their excellent Chrome Extension
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clippingsio-for-
ki...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clippingsio-for-kindle-
an/pnibcoleffbpdiohejiinidocmklphde?hl=en)

At first glances readwise seems underwhelming compared to clippings.io, am I
missing something?

~~~
tristanho
Clippings.io is a great tool for easily exporting Kindle highlights to
Evernote, which is quite valuable to many users! We love what you've done, but
we're going in a different direction. Thanks for taking the time to create a
profile to share this feedback with us.

------
farsight
Think you might be interested in checking out
[https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) for expansion ideas!

------
stpe
Thanks for doing this - this seems like a very good addition to improve the
retention of the information intake for books. At least for me - I've noticed
that resurfacing what matters to me within a quite short timeframe after
reading it, definitely improves how easy (or hard) I find to apply the key
takeaways of a book after I've read it.

Tried to sign-up using Amazon, but got an HTTP 500 in the auth callback:
/accounts/amazon/login/callback/

~~~
tristanho
Hey stpe! Sorry about this -- our site seems to be acting up under this HN
traffic. We're looking at it right now and we'll have it fixed soon!

Edit: We're back! Sorry about that. Actually seems to have been an upstream
issue with Amazon's oauth.

------
jszymborski
> To finish the signup process, you'll need to be on a computer and using
> Google Chrome or Safari. Sorry about that!

I really wish you would have told me that before I supplied access to my
amazon account.

Also, why in the world does this need to be an extension? Giving you
permissions on both my amazon account and my browser is an awful lot of
purview for an organising my e-book highlights...

~~~
tristanho
Hey jszym, that's our bad. We do mention the extension being required on our
landing page (below the fold), but we definitely could make it more clear.
Thanks for raising it to our attention.

If you like, I can purge our db of your Amazon auth -- all we get is your name
and email from the amazon login.

We need the extension because, unfortunately, Amazon doesn't provide a Kindle
API. The extension is used to let you export your highlights from Amazon's
cloud easily.

~~~
mintplant
Have you considered packaging the Chrome extension as a WebExtension for
Firefox?

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/Po...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-
ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension)

------
ryanmarsh
This looks pretty cool. I’d rather use this than maintain my mess of selenium
scripts I was using for this purpose.

------
digorithm
Hey, thank you for the product, I will be using it regularly.

One feature request though: I'd like to use Readwise as my "central dump of
highlights," but not every highlight I have is in my Kindle, it would be nice
if it allowed to manually insert highlights I find elsewhere (e.g website,
physical book).

------
hypercluster
Very cool! I'm always bummed when I read a cool book and forget nearly
everything after a couple of months (especially info dense books). Thought
about taking notes on paper but this is way better, though I wouldn't want the
daily mail.

~~~
tristanho
Thanks hypercluster! Why wouldn't you want the daily email? Not the right
medium?

------
abuiles
Super interesting, I did a small tool for myself for this same purpose. Is a
mix between highlights and Evernote
[https://kintrospect.com/](https://kintrospect.com/)

------
spookyuser
This is cool, but most of the books on my Kindle don't come from Amazon so the
highlights aren't synced online. I would like a version of this that just
works on the kindle's myclippings.txt file.

~~~
noshbrinken
This tool will parse your local My Clippings file to JSON:
[https://github.com/maxhallinan/my-clippings-to-
json](https://github.com/maxhallinan/my-clippings-to-json)

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nexus2045
I've been waiting for this service my whole life! What a great idea.

------
blaenk
I suspect this is mainly for Amazon-bought books with highlights stored on
Amazon's servers right? Or does this also work with notes made on side-loaded
books?

~~~
tristanho
That is indeed correct. We currently only support importing your highlights
synced with Amazon's cloud.

It's totally possible to also allow you sync with the notes from books on your
device, but the UX is a bit worse -- you've got to physically plugin your
device. That being said, it's on our todo list!

~~~
jbillz95
I would be very excited for this when the notes are synced from non-amazon
books, as most of mine are not purchased through amazon.

