What's a good way to store quotes from the books you read?

[Logseman]

When I read, I'm always at the hunt for lovely bits to highlight and quote. The problem for me is that I find no way to save it in a platform-agnostic way. I know there is Zotero, but it and its competitors are focused at helping researchers, who have entirely different needs than I do. It also doesn't help my search that "quote manager" and "quote management" are specific sales concepts so it's hard to find software.

The best solution I've found so far is sharing a highlight on Apple Notes, as it includes some of the metadata of the book. As someone who uses more than one device to read and who's never had two e-readers of the same brand to date, it's hardly scalable though. As I was thinking about this I've seen that there's a tool called Readwise, but is there any other tool or strategy that you use for this?

[Aleron Ives]

It depends what you mean by "good". It's quite possible to save excerpts in a platform-agnostic way if you're willing to put in the work. Decrypt and decompress the book, and then you can copy/paste any quotes you want into a plain text file that any device can read.

[rantanplan]

Readwise is too expensive for what you get from it. I'd probably use notion.so with their free plan, or Obsidian if you want to put the work into learning it.

[Quoth]

Calibre, then copy extracted stuff elsewhere. Best for Kobo.

[astrangerhere]

I use Obsidian to create mind maps of my reading. I like quotes, but I like them better If I can connect them to other quotes from other things I've read. I've attached a screenshot, but each pinpoint is a quote from something I've read this year that is connected to something else I've read in the past.

[rantanplan]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I use Obsidian to create mind maps of my reading. I like quotes, but I like them better If I can connect them to other quotes from other things I've read. I've attached a screenshot, but each pinpoint is a quote from something I've read this year that is connected to something else I've read in the past.

Can you give some examples on how you connect them? Like, on an emotional level or how stories or themes develop similarly between books?

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by rantanplan

Can you give some examples on how you connect them? Like, on an emotional level or how stories or themes develop similarly between books?

Here is a snip of an Obsidian note connecting Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler both talking about the Santa Ana winds in California. Excuse the bracketing, etc., that is the .md language that connects notes in Obsidian.

[rantanplan]

Thank you!

[jackm8]

I love the way Pocketbook does this in it's default viewer. They have normal highlights feature, then there's Screenshot. With screenshot you just draw a box over your screen, and it captures contents in .png format. Everything reads .png, easy to transfer, captures fonts used when read, font size used, works exactly the same on pdf files and on epub, captures images, diagrams... Few drawbacks, text isn't searchable, and file sizes can be quite large, since it's png.
I usually just transfer whole directories of those notes to desktop and view them in image viewer. It's also possible to open them in Photoshop and create a collage out of them.