The Best App for Book Notes and Highlights

Book notes have a specific shape that general notes apps handle badly. Highlights arrive in bulk, from several sources, in the order you read them, and they are useless in that form. What you want at the end is a short note in your own words that you will actually reuse.

So this is really two problems, and most people solve only the first.

1. Getting highlights out of Kindle, Apple Books, physical books, and PDFs.
2. Turning them into something you will use, which no app does for you.

The short answer

If you want one recommendation: Readwise into Obsidian. Readwise handles the extraction and the resurfacing, Obsidian is where the highlights become notes that connect to the rest of your thinking. Roughly $10 a month for the half you would otherwise do by hand.

If you want a free version that works: export from read.amazon.com/notebook manually, paste into whatever you use, and write your summary the same day. Slightly tedious, and functionally equivalent for anyone reading a book or two a month.

Readwise, and what it actually does

Two things, and they are worth separating because only one is hard to replace.

It collects. Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper, Pocket, articles, podcasts, and photographs of physical pages via OCR. Then it syncs the lot into Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, Roam, or Anki, and keeps them updated as you read. This is the part that is genuinely tedious to replicate.

It resurfaces. A daily email with a handful of old highlights. This is the feature people either love or ignore entirely, and it is worth understanding why it helps: highlights you never see again decay completely, and a passive daily glance is at least contact. It is not spaced repetition, because you are not retrieving anything, only recognising. Useful for keeping ideas in circulation, not for learning them.

The honest limitation: Readwise moves highlights around very well and does nothing about whether they were worth highlighting. It is infrastructure, not thinking.

The problem no app solves

A highlight is not a note.

Highlighting is the cheapest possible act of saving. It feels like processing and it is closer to a bookmark: you have marked a sentence someone else wrote and moved on. Sync 4,000 of them into your notes app and you have a searchable archive of other people's sentences and no evidence you understood any of them. That is the collector's fallacy in its most industrialised form.

The step that makes book notes worth having is small and non-optional:

Within a day of finishing, write half a page in your own words with the book closed.

What was the argument, what convinced you, what did not, and what does it change. Closed book, because open book is copying. This is a retrieval attempt, so it doubles as active recall, and the parts you cannot reconstruct tell you what you actually absorbed.

Then, if the book deserves it, break the durable ideas into separate notes that link to your existing ones. That is what literature notes and permanent notes are for, and it is the difference between a reading log and a body of knowledge.

By situation

You read on Kindle and want it automated. Readwise into Obsidian or Notion. Set it up once and highlights arrive in your notes without effort. Set up the summary habit at the same time, or you have automated the collection of material you will not read.

You read on Kindle and will not pay. read.amazon.com/notebook shows every highlight from every book in a browser, and you can copy them out. Do it per book when you finish, which is the natural moment anyway.

You read on Apple Books. Highlights sync to iCloud and can be shared out of the app into Apple Notes. Clumsier than Kindle and adequate for a book at a time.

You read physical books. Nothing beats marginalia plus an index on the back page, where you note page numbers of what mattered as you go. When you finish, that index is your extraction list and typing it up takes fifteen minutes. Readwise's photo OCR shortens the typing.

You read academic PDFs. Zotero, which handles annotation, metadata, and citations together, and integrates with Obsidian for the notes half. General notes apps are a poor fit for citation management. See how to take research notes.

You want a reading database. Notion, with fields for rating, status, and topic. Good if you want to track what you read; it will not make you think about it, and it is easy to spend more time on the database than on the books.

What to look for

• Real export. Your reading notes should outlive the app. Markdown out is the test.
• Deduplication on re-sync. Highlights get re-imported constantly, and a tool that creates duplicates makes a mess quickly.
• Note plus highlight in one place. You need somewhere for your own words next to the quoted ones, and the two must be visually distinguishable a year later.
• Source and page captured automatically. Nothing kills a note's usefulness like finding a great line you cannot cite.

The habit, stripped down

1. Highlight sparingly while reading. If more than about 5% of a book is marked, you are marking recognition, not importance.
2. Extract within a day of finishing.
3. Write half a page from memory, book closed.
4. Split out anything durable into its own note and link it to what you already think.
5. Delete the rest of the highlights, or leave them where they will not clutter search.

Step 5 is the one people resist and it is the one that keeps the system usable. Everything you keep, you will one day have to search past.

More in how to take notes from a book, how to remember what you read, progressive summarization, the best notes app for research, and the wider best notes apps section.