Using Kindle/eBook highlights in Obsidian

Dear Reader,

Do you use e-books rather than PDFs in your academic or personal work?

I do, and if I don't take notes, the memory of books lasts only about 6 months. That's a waste!

A better way I developed over the last couple of years, is to import the book highlights into Obsidian.

But stored highlights are just information.

To go from information → knowledge, you need to connect the passages from the book with your own thinking.

To help with this, I use an AI skill that analyses the imported highlights and surfaces relevant notes and projects in my vault. From here, I can start taking notes on the ideas presented in the book and connect them to the knowledge network.

Here is an example (left the book note, bottom right, its connections, top right a topic note with a link to a highlight):

The key to building a knowledge network and generating ideas from it, is to link the claims/ideas/notes you extract from the book to the individual passages and highlights, for validation in years to come!

This essential step is called block-linking.

Think of it as giving directions (to your future self). If someone asks you where the nearest grocery store is, you don't tell them "the central district", but instead give them the street name and directions to get there.

A block link does the same thing: it points to one specific passage in the book, so any claim you make years from now still carries its evidence.

This week's tutorial covers the entire process with examples from importing highlights to AI to block-linking.

Summary: There are three ways of connecting Kindle to Obsidian: (1) Readwise for $10 a month (most options), (2) Unearthed one-time payment of $13 (my recommendation) and (3) the Kindle importer plugin, which is free but lacks customisation. After the import, an AI skill analyses the highlights and suggests related concepts/projects in your vault, and finally you use these suggestions to connect the book to your thinking. The result is a network of connected ideas, grounded in the book, rather than a loose summary.

Thanks for being part of EA!

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Ilya Shabanov, The Effortless Academic​

The Effortless Academic is a community, newsletter and learning place for the modern academic, where you can learn to leverage academic tools, digital note-taking strategies and AI for a stress-free, successful career.
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If you're ready to dive in, start with the foundation of Digital Note Taking to remember and synthesise ideas, the AI Lit Review Course to learn about recent (AI) tools for finding, reading and skimming relevant academic papers, or the AI writing and publishing courses to effectively publish your ideas.