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This is a problem that wasn’t explicitly raised in the things that motivated this post, but it’s something I get asked frequently. It will by necessity be an overview of some useful tools and options for researchers, but if you leave comments I can probably expand on individual points/sections in follow-up posts if needed. I want this post to get into the weeds about how to get your materials off a Kindle device, how to store it usefully on a Mac (my apologies, PC/Linux users), and how to repurpose those notes to be creative, to write, and to think. But how do we use them to their utmost? How do we even gather them together and store them? How do we use them for our writing, for our thinking? These are all important questions which I don’t feel have been properly answered, and where those answers have been given, they’re buried or hidden somewhere out on the internet. The problems Maria and Tim bemoan are things that every other Kindle user has had to deal with since day one, so thankfully there are a number of workarounds that simplify the process of reading, annotating and sifting within one’s notes of a book or document. But the good thing is that there are solutions. She then goes on to some more detailed points of how this doesn’t work, and Tim commiserates, suggesting that maybe they should hire some people to fix this problem. (…) There is no viable solution that I know.” 3 If you want to fix it you have to do it manually within Evernote. The formatting is kind of shitty in the kindle notes on the desktop(…) if you copy them, they paste into Evernote with this really weird formatting. I don’t have to wait till I’ve finished the book. But sometimes I will also take a screengrab of a kindle page with my highlighted passage, and then email that screengrab into my Evernote email, because Evernote has, as you know, Optical Character Recognition, so when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image. I go to those, I copy them from that page, and I paste them into an Evernote file to have all my notes on a specific book in one place. “I highlight in the kindle app on the iPad, and then Amazon has this function that you can basically see your kindle notes on the desktop on your computer. Both Tim and Maria expressed frustration over the lack of tools for people wanting to download and interact with their Kindle clippings: Later in the week, Maria Popova (of Brainpickings fame) was on Tim Ferriss’ podcast to talk about her website, her reading and her workflow. Only after examining the data, laying it out and handling it, can we feel comfortable in reaching complex decisions.” 2 Understanding often emerges gradually from the accumulation of factual detail and from our growing comprehension of the relationships among isolated details. Notes are a process for clarifying thinking and for refining inchoate ideas.
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