Matt Gedye
Book Notes
Mostly I read to learn and therefore predominantly read non-fiction. When I become curious about a topic, I’ll search for books to help satiate that curiosity. But my record keeping of the ideas, quotes or phrases in books I’ve read over the years has been inconsistent. Mostly scribbles in journals. Many years ago I was inspired by Derek Sivers’ book notes. I’d often thought about doing it myself but never did. I chose to change that at the end of 2024, making digital notes from physical books and my Kobo eReader.
Physical Books
When transcribing notes from from physical books, I have always keep a pencil with me while reading. When something jumps out at me - an interesting sentence or paragraph, name of someone I’d like to learn more about, a book that looks interesting, etc. - I put an opening square bracket ([) at the beginning of the word, sentence, paragraph, etc. and a closing square bracket (]) at the end. Taking note of the page number, I then flick back to the inside cover of the book (or the first completely clear page) and write said page number. Once I’ve finished the book I open a plain text file on the computer, go to the inside cover where I’ve recorded all the pages with bracketed text and revisit those pages one by one, typing out the bracketed text verbatim in the text file. For borrowed books I’ll erase the pencil as I go.
Kobo eReader
On my Kobo it’s even easier and is the main reason I bought an eReader after vowing for many years that I never would. All I have to do is highlight the text I want to save and it automatically saves it as an annotation. When I finish the book, I hit Export Annotations, and all highlighted text is exported as a plain text file I can then retrieve from my Kobo by plugging it into the computer.
Fiction
I still enjoy reading fiction, but am much less likely to take notes. Therefore, reading fiction is like hitting pause for non-fiction note-taking. It allows me the time to work through the recent non-fiction reads in the queue if they’ve begun to pile up (I read faster than I can type out the notes).
It’s still early days, but I’ve already observed several benefits to note-taking in this way and wish I’d have started sooner:
Portability: Books themselves are heavy and cumbersome. So are my journals with my early notes. I had eleven journals before deciding to digitise. I couldn’t possibly bring all these with me with the amount of overseas travel my family and I are doing at the moment. So, all digital book notes simply live on my computer.
Organised: I’m interested in many things, but not all at the same time. I can read quite intensely on one topic for a few months but then not revisit it again for several years. This is painful when trying to find the right journal or notebook, or even the right book if it’s in storage or something I borrowed from the library when I want the notes. All my book notes now live in nicely organised directories and are safely backed up on my private server.
Writing: At the moment while I only have notes from a handful of books, it’s nice to be able to pull them up, scroll through them, pick a dot point that’s interesting and then write at length about it. In addition to this though, as my collection of notes increases, I want to be able to use them in the same way that I write in academic research papers. That is, synthesising ideas from a multitude of different, but related topics, while also analysing and critiquing them.
Sharing: These notes are taken verbatim from the original text. Therefore I won’t be sharing them publicly out of fear of copyright infringement. But I’m comfortable sharing them with friends and family. In this way if I want someone to read a book, I can provide a snapshot to hopefully encourage them to go and read the whole thing.
P.S What I’m doing now.