Best Note Taking method for Kindle and other E-Readers. Everyone is super excited about reading a book a week or a day and that’s amazing but in my opinion it’s only the beginning. It’s important to actually read the books it’s the first step of the process but what’s equally important or perhaps even more important is what we do with the books after we read them just reading books and collect them as trophies on a bookshelf although they look nice will not do much for us.
There is a trend of masses shifting from Traditional Paperback to E books. But the biggest hurdle that people face in making this transition is of taking better notes. Note-taking is essential for students, researchers, and professionals alike. High-lighting in your E Reader is one thing but organizing that information in tangible form that can be viewed later on is another. The challenge of taking notes of the information we read is real. Here, we will explore Best Note Taking method for Kindle but this method works for other E Readers like Kobo & Nook as well
Table Of Content
- Benefit of Note Taking
- Ways to Take Notes
- Organized Note Taking In E book Reader
- Highlighting on your E Reader
- Exporting Your Highlighted Note
- Organizing The Highlighted Notes
- FAQs on Taking Notes of eBooks using E-Readers
Benefits of Note-Taking
The importance of taking note taking cannot be sufficiently stressed. We think that just reading something would be enough. But that’s not the case, at least not for me or countless others like me. Better notes enhance your comprehension, help you retain important information and improve recalling.
Ways to Take Notes
1. The paper & pen method. Nothing beats the classic paper and pen method but its slow the reedits are hard and so hard that you leave a lot of important details. This process is even harder when you don’t have the margins to write on or you have to shift between your E book reader and paper and pen.
2. Finding Summaries from the internet. This way is pretty fast but what resonates with you might not be important for the one who wrote the summary. They will omit important details and you won’t get the most out of reading the book.
3. Simple Highlighting On E-Reader. Let’s be honest we rarely go back to a book, sifting through all the pages to find what we highlights & finding what we were looking for.
4. Organized Note Taking with E-Reader. This method does require a few steps but once the system is in place and everything is streamlined then this Method will help you take the best notes with the least amount of Effort. This method works on almost every E Reader But we will be using Kindle to demonstrate the steps.
Organized Note Taking with E-Reader
So this is by far the best Note Taking method for Kindle and other E-Readers. The steps involved are:
- Highlighting on your E Reader
- Exporting Your Highlighted Notes
- Organizing The Highlighted Notes
Step 1: Highlighting on your E Reader
Make Highlights: Make Highlights of Chapters/ Topic heading and all the relevant info in your book.
Take Notes While Highlighting: If you want to summarize any idea in a book the best time is while you are reading the topic. It helps you connect the highlighted idea with the topic and helps you retain better. But this step can be repeated latter as well as note taking isn’t that convenient in E-ink screens.
Step 2: Exporting Your Highlighted Notes
There are 3 ways of exporting your highlights.
Use Readwise.
If you take your reading seriously the most convenient way of exporting these notes is by using Readwise. It essentially automates everything when it comes to your Kindle highlights. If you’re like me, you know how annoying it can be to have to export all your highlights from every single book. Readwise takes care of all of that for you.
Make a Readwise account and connect it to your Amazon account, it’ll automatically take all your Kindle highlights from all the books you’ve already read, as well as all the books you read in the future, and import them into the Readwise database.
You can then review your highlights through their daily email or through the Readwise app – You can see your insight, tag highlights, and do so much more within the app.
Furthermore, you can export these notes to any of the note taking apps like Evernote or Notion easily with a single click.
The best part? It’s all automated – there’s no manual effort required, and there’s no exporting or importing necessary. This method also work with other E-book Readers like Kobo
Export Notes Via connecting with PC
Connect your Kindle to your PC.
Locate the notes file & Navigate to the “documents” folder on your Kindle, find a file named “My Clippings.txt.” This file contains all of your highlights and notes.
Once you have opened the notes file, you can save it and organize your notes however you like. You can create a new document and copy and paste your notes into it. (I use MS Word and add in my own notes. It may take you some time to write it in a way that appeals the eyes by adding heading and subheadings).
Export Notes Via Email.
When you finish a book in the Kindle app, you can export and download your highlights. The process is simple: click on the book you want to export, touch the upper part of the screen to access the main menu, click on “Go To”, then “Notes”, and finally “Export Notes”.
In a few moments, you will receive an email with your exported notes in CSV and PDF format. If you don’t have a Kindle, you can still export your notes in HTML or text format using your phone, computer, or tablet.
Once you have your notes exported and downloaded, you can paste them into your note-taking app.
Step 3: Organizing The Highlighted Notes
After transferring, the notes can be organized by using any note taking apps like Evernote, OneNote or Notion.
Notion is highly recommended for this step. It has numerous free and paid templates for book summaries and note taking. You can also use any of the templates to organize and save your highlighted book summaries.
Or you can use other note taking systems like Zettlekesten or Second Brain to make better notes.
Hope that this was helpful. If you aren’t sure which eBook Reader to buy then do visit our recommendations for best e-book readers to buy. Or if you aren’t sure which book to read then see best apps for book recommendations.
