How to never forget what you read

Despite the fact I much prefer the experience of reading a paper book, it’s hard to question the utility of e-books. The ability to have the equivalent of an entire library with you at practically all times is just too good to pass up. Add to that the convenience of highlighting and adding notes, syncing between devices, copy-pasting, exporting — I could go on. Even when I buy a paper book, I often find myself diverting to an e-copy if I want to actually study it — over the years I’ve gradually developed something of a workflow for how to study a digital book. I figured today I’d share the various softwares I use to manage my e-reading, and maybe probe you lot for some suggestions, too.

My e-reading workflow

I’ve got a few sources and softwares I tend to use nowadays, so let’s start with a quick list, then I’ll get into the workflow.

• Project Gutenberg — This is a phenomenal resource for vast swathes of human knowledge that are no longer in copyright. If there’s anything fairly old that you want to read, like pretty much our entire body of written work before this century, try here first. With a collection of over 60,000 free e-books, you can pretty much educate yourself for free.
• Calibre — Calibre is how I manage my collection of e-books, at least for those I haven’t just bought on Kindle, which…