Scrawling in the Margins of a Kindle
Whenever I read books, I end up with piles of ideas. Things to write about; things to do. If I’m reading on paper—which I do only rarely—I’ll scrawl ideas in the margins and pretend I’ll come back to them later. When I’m reading a Kindle book, it’s hard to even pretend. I could use Kindle’s built-in Notes feature, but getting text out is a true boondoggle…and if you’ve ever tried typing on an e-ink touchscreen, you’ll know that the input end of things isn’t pretty, either. I could read in my browser and type my thoughts in a clumsy Notes field there, but then I’d be right back to the problem of how to process the text on the other side. I could quote the Kindle book text by copying and pasting it on my phone or computer, but all of Kindle’s apps block that.
I’ve always wanted a way to capture ideas into a personal archive in a few keystrokes, accompanied by context for reference, but not trapped in the context that sparked them. I needed a workflow. So today, I built one.
A Workflow for Capturing Kindle Marginalia
1.If reading studiously, start in Kindle Cloud Reader, for access to a hardware keyboard and touch-typable shortcuts.
2.Whenever a striking passage rolls around, take a screenshot using CloudApp. CloudApp can instantly upload any screenshot and add a link to the clipboard. In CloudApp’s preferences, select “Copy direct link to clipboard” to prefer links to the unadorned image files themselves. CloudApp can also intercept the standard take-a-partial-screenshot keyboard shortcut— ⇧⌘4 on a Mac — allowing muscle memory to prevail.
3.Invoke Alfred with a keyboard shortcut, specify the “Append to text file” workflow using the appropriate keyword, and start typing an idea.
4.Within the Alfred text entry window, reference the relevant Kindle passage by adding a Markdown image reference—
—with the CloudApp direct link (which should be hanging out on the clipboard) pasted in-between the parentheses.
5.Hit “Return” on the keyboard and the entered text will be whisked away, bringing the Kindle Cloud App screen back into full view. Behind the scenes, the note will have been appended to a text file. If following the workflow linked above, that text file will be titled according to the date; every new line of text will automatically be preceded by a hyphen followed by a space, which represents (and is typically displayed as) a bullet point in Markdown. The bash script within the Alfred workflow looks like this:
echo "- {query}" >> ~/Dropbox/Notes/$(date +"%Y%m%d")\ Notes.txt6.Go to Dropbox and open the Notes folder, then find the file that just got created. Open it in Marked 2, a Markdown previewer. The file will look something like this:
I like Marked 2’s Lopash theme for this use case; the differences between background vs. image and note text vs. quoted text are clear without being jarring.
7.To play with collected ideas, use Folding Text to move them around, Markdown intact. Then, open the file again in Marked 2 again to see the images expand in-place once more.
The best part: this works for anything! Anything screenshottable can be referenced in a running text file in a few keystrokes. All it takes is five different apps and an afternoon. Is it worth it? It was for me.
