I have recently changed the way I extract the highlights from my Kobo books when I discovered the thekobonotes.com free service. From there, I have also changed how I "consume" such highlights now that I integrate them with both Evernote and readwise.io.

The service readwise.io is actually the more recent addition to my reading "infrastructure". Basically, it allow the possibility to extract highlights from almost anything such as Web articles (I use the integration with Pocket but it also support other services such instapaper), from ebooks (more particularly from Kindle books as it is able to automatically fetch the highlights/annotations), and from tweet (which is quite powerful since you can ask it save a complete thread of tweet very easily).

What I like from readwise.io is that it will send me a daily list of "notes"/highlights that I need to review every day (currently set to 5 notes), which is a great way to returns to notes/hightlights that you have extracted from books/articles, over time.

As I said, the integration between readwise.io and Kindle is complete/automated. As you read your kindle books and highlight sections of the books, those are automatically synced on the amazon server and eventually recuperated by readwise.io. But such integration doesn`t exist with Kobo since Kobo doesn`t support this synchronization feature, or maybe they are just starting to implement it. But as I read only books that are not coming from the Kobo store, even if Kobo was supporting the synchronization of the highlights they will not do so for books not coming from their store. So I need an alternate approach, which I am describing here.

The first step consist in extracting the highlights from all the books that we have stored in the Kobo. To do so I use the thekobonotes.com services, which consist in the following steps:

I will not repeat all the steps/details here as I have already done so in a previous post ( https://chezpierre.postach.io/post/kobo-comment-recuperer-facilement-vos-surlignages-highlights ). Although it is written in french, the screenshots will guide you.

At the end, you will have a page similar as this one, where all your books are listed on the left, and the highlights of the selected book appearing in the middle:

In general, the "normal" integration works from

Ebook-->readwise.io --> Evernote,

but mine differs as it goes from :

Ebook-->Evernote-->readwise.io.

The reason is simple: readwise.io require unique URL in order to be able to accept highlights from different books, which cannot provide thebobonotes.com (yet). So what I do, is that I use the Evernote web clipper to extract all of a given book highlights and when I want to send such highlights back to readwise.io, I will use the web version of Evernote to do so.

Let's try a complete example using the book "Getting things Done" :

1) Let's call the web clipper while the book is already selected:

Which bring the web clipper:

As you can see, I have reduce the scope of the web page to only extract the highlights of the book.

Clicking "Save Clip" will save the page content in Evernote!

That's it, at this point we have extracted the book highlights from the Kobo and recuperated them inside of Evernote. That could be enough for most users. The next section will discuss how I bring those highlights in readwise.io.

Now that we have our kobo book highlights in Evernote, we are ready to bring them inside of readwise.io. Although this is not an automated process, I like it this way because I revise my highlights at the same time, and revising the "notes"/highlights immediately after reading a book is very important and this approach allow me to sometime "regroup" some highlights together when they appear more meaningful this way, or even reject something that I don't want to keep

1) We need to access our Evernote note from the Web interface:

2) Using the Readwise chrome plugin, I will select each notes and send them to Readwise. Basically, I will click 3 times on a note content to have all of it selected and a right-click will provide me access to the readwise plugin:

I will do so for each notes I want to send to Readwise.io (i.e. click 3 times on the text and right-click to "Save Highlight to Readwise")

This process is very fast and doesn't take long. I am inviting to review your notes at the same time as you will see that some will make more sense to be merged together.

At this point, readwise.io doesn't know that we have brought the content of a kobo book since it will identify it as a web article named "All Notes -Evernote Web".

We need to edit its metadata:

After doing so, you will see your book's annotation under the book section:

And your highlights will be visible on the book page and will be part of future daily reviews:

This approach is not automated the way that kindle users are able to experience, but although it seems to contains a lot of steps, it is very easy and fast to do the complete thing and it fit very well with the revision of a book after completing it. I think that such revision, combined with the intention of bringing the highlights inside of Evernote and readwise.io are complementary. It should take less than 15 minutes for a book containing about 75 highlights I would evaluate.

Note: This integration should work with the "Readwise Lite" plan too, as it doesn't required the integration with Evernote.