Ask HN: Best Apps/Systems to Organize Reading Material

13 points by patrick_halina 5 years ago | 10 comments

Does anybody have suggestions for apps or systems to organize reading materials? Eg. articles, papers, books and notes. Right now I use Pocket, but it's pretty much to read a quick article and throw it away. I've kept lists of papers/articles in Trello or Evernote, then I'll make notes in Evernote. I use Kindle to read books and then I translate highlights into light notes in Evernote. It's a bit of a pain though moving between the apps, and I've lost some faith in Evernote lately.

I'm looking to organize and keep track of past articles and keep lists of things to read by categories. Before I invest more into the tagging/list features that Pocket has, I'm curious to see what other people do.

gofreddygo 5 years ago |

I use email thyself to capture links, snippets and images.

Move them out to plain text files whenever I have the time. These are just text files. I add lines that begin with some keywords like "topic:", "source:" "subject:", etc. Semi regularly, check these into my git repo and sync then into my nvalt dir.

This way I can search by topic, search by date, find files with no topics, group links by domains, run stats over them, extract links for any topic, download those links into a single pdf onto my kindle, group them by year, find where I get my most interesting links, cache and index the content of the links themselves.

The act of moving from email to plain text to git keeps things in shape without going out of control. I don't care if any of the services or sources are dead, things are backed up in my email + git + devices I use.

I also got pretty good at awk, grep, cut and sort working with this.

marcionitao 5 years ago | |

This way of managing notes is very interesting. How is it possible to do this using email?

kevas 5 years ago |

If one is on a tablet, would suggest MarginNote as it has tags & folders. Additionally, there’s a notion of a Study Document and with this, you can combine material from several sources and creat mind maps or hierarchical notes that will take you to the exact location.

Felony_Fred 5 years ago |

How about you use Firefox with Multi-Account Containers [0].

Firefox can take multiple thousand open tabs ( up to 2500 for sure ) without crashing. Your local files can most likely all be opened in the browser give or take a few tweaks. Multi-Account Container is good for organizing that and has a bunch of other very interesting applications.

You can also use a Firefox Account to sync all that stuff you'll never read ;p across multiple devices.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

TimJRobinson 5 years ago |

Readwise is good for syncing highlights from pocket/kindle to Evernote (or other services) if you want to automate that.

I use Trello for lists of what to read too.

I recently switched from Evernote to Obsidian for note management and it's been amazing. I love the UI, that my notes are just markdown files, and it's really nice for linking notes together. Obsidian doesn't have readwise integration though.

notoriousarun 5 years ago |

Now you can convert your favorite articles collection into clutter-free print-ready or a printed magazine using

https://pipecontent.com

Share your public collections, and receive a high-quality PDF or a printed-magazine.

No distractions, no ads - just a single-minded focus on reading. It’s how text was meant to be consumed.

kirubakaran 5 years ago |

https://histre.com/ (mine) might suit your needs. Plus it has Hacker News integration that the other apps don't have: https://histre.com/features/

stevesycombacct 5 years ago |

Overall I prefer Instapaper to Feedly due to the minimalist design and dark mode on mobile. However, there are strong arguments for either one.[0]

Additionally, I use Feedly[1] to discover content from sites in an RSS-like system. I find that visiting Feedly daily in the browser, then saving content to Instapaper using a browser extension for later works optimally for me.

[0] https://medium.com/@janniks/instapaper-vs-pocket-2019-compar...

[1] https://feedly.com/

kejaed 5 years ago |

I started using Zotero this year and have been really happy with it.

https://www.zotero.org/

marcionitao 5 years ago |

Today there are many alternatives on the market. I invite you to take a look at Raindrop.io.