6 months later, and I’m still using Evernote, still for capturing reading highlights, from physical books using OCR apps like Prizmo before switching to TextGrabber. The latter has superior Evernote integration, though I did write feedback to the developers of the former, and they responded positively. Taking a picture of a page and correcting the errors is still less painstaking than typing in a lengthy quote from a book, but it still looks weird, even in 2015.
The only—quite compelling—reason I would consider going electronic-only is that I can wash any food I happen to be eating while reading. Even that said, I so much prefer reading books in paper form than electronic. Just to put that to the test, on Prime Day, I bought a Kindle for $30 off the regular price. There should be enough ebooks in my backlog to read to make it already worth it. Maybe one day Amazon will grace us Canadians with the lending library.
Amazon won’t deliver my unit until August, so in the meantime I’m reading up on syncing Kindle highlights with Evernote (info current as of 2014) and converting from ePub to Kindle formats (info current as of 2010) and thinking of a workflow to get the ones I want to share on my Tumblr, just using my iPhone if possible. The most recent quote from a book comes from Becoming Steve by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, and a longer one from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthoy Marra is in the pipeline.
I initially chose Evernote to store reading highlights because the was a third-party service that would look at the content of the note and suggest around the web, make notes inside Evernote, and annotate the original note (the highlight) with links to the suggested content. That tiny startup’s product is no longer with us, though a server they forgot to turn off does email me occasionally to say my language isn’t supported.
