Searching for Accurate Maps

Do you read books on Kindle or a Kindle app on an iPad or similar device? Do you want to make notes or highlight passages in your ebooks but don’t know how? Would you like to have access to all your notes and highlighted passages even when you don’t have your Kindle or iPad with you? Would you like to do this but don’t have an Amazon.com account, or you buy your ebooks from some other store than Amazon.com? Would you like to share your notes and highlights with others? Would you like to transport all your notes and highlights into Evernote? If your answer to any or all of the above is ‘yes’ then read on.

In this post, I show you how I, a Japan resident who purchases most of his Kindle books on Amazon Japan (not Amazon.com, I don’t have an account there)  get my book notes and highlights made on my iPad’s Kindle app into Evernote. It’s a non-geeky (no coding required), unoriginal solution that makes use of free automation services and apps: Evernote, Kindle app for iPad, Twitter, IFTTT.

(This is for Kindles or Kindle apps only; I’m still figuring out how to do the same thing for notes/hightlights created in iBooks. Here’s a video on how to share notes and highlights in the iBooks app.)

Why bother?

Why would you want your Kindle notes in Evernote? As you’ll see below, notes and highlights made on a Kindle or Kindle app are automatically stored on your Amazon Kindle page. So why bother transferring them? You can edit them, sort them by book or by date, delete them, all on your Amazon Kindle page. Well, I like to have as much of my work- and research-related info as possible under one roof, not scattered across different programs or devices. Also, with Evernote’s offline notebooks capacity, I can access and edit my book notes in Evernote even without Internet access. If those considerations are not important to you, then you can stop reading right here. If you’d like to know more about your Amazon Kindle page, read Michael Hyatt’s post: How to Get Your Kindle Highlights into Evernote.

Evernote ambassador and SF writer Jamie Rubin has a geeky and long-assed post on how he gets his Kindle book notes and highlights into Evernote AUTOMATICALLY, but it requires knowledge of snakes and anyway it only works for notes taken on a Kindle device. If you take notes on, say, the Kindle App on your iPad, you’re out of luck. There is an app called Snippefy, which seems to do exactly what Rubin and I want, but unfortunately it’s not available for Apple Japan.

Michael Hyatt’s post: How to Get Your Kindle Highlights into Evernote, is good, but it involves manually transferring each highlight/note from your Amazon Kindle page to Evernote. This article gives a very good overview of Amazon’s Kindle page. I recommend it. For best results, and if you don’t mind not sharing your notes on Twitter, the simplest solution may be to wait until you finish reading your book and making all your notes and highlights, then going to your Amazon Kindle page, selecting all the notes for that book and copying and pasting those suckers into an Evernote. You have to do this manually, tho. Or perhaps Snippefy will do the job. Unfortunately, I cannot test it out.

Once set up (explained below), and assuming I’m reading a book on my iPad’s Kindle app, theree are just 4  manual steps, all done within the Kindle app (see below for details).

One caveat:

what you get in your Evernote is a tweet: just 140 characters. It won’t be your entire highlighted text plus your entire note. In other words, it won’t be everything that is on your Amazon Kindle page. This is not exactly what I want, but I don’t know how to get the entire text from Amazon cloud into Evernote. (But that’s why there’s Snippefy.)

Before we start

Before I explain the setup, I suggest you read Michael  Hyatt’s post: How to Get Your Kindle Highlights into Evernote, if you haven’t done so already. Off you go. It’s short and sweet. I’ll have a cup of tea while I’m waiting.

Welcome back! Now you know that your highlights and notes are stored in the cloud on your Amazon Kindle page. (If you have not already checked out your Amazon Kindle page, do so now. I’ll have another cup of tea.)

What you need

• an Amazon account (or some Amazon ID that will let you login to your Amazon Kindle page
• a Twitter account (free)
• an Evernote account (free) with a note created to receive your tweets about a particular Kindle book you’re reading
• an IFTTT account (at IFTTT.com) (also free)

You’ll need to log into your Amazon account first, or create one if you don’t have one already (you can’t login with your Amazon Japan ID, unfortunately; and Amazon Japan does not have its own Kindle page. I actually use my Amazon UK account to login to my Amazon Kindle page.)

However, all my Kindle purchases (mostly bought on Amazon Japan) are listed on my Amazon Kindle page, hosted at Amazon.com, and I can see them once I login (see Michael Hyatt’s post for details.)

(This is a recent change for Amazon Japan account holders, I think. When I first read Hyatt’s post sometime early in 2013, I discovered there was nothing listed in my Amazon Kindle page, so I was unable to execute his suggestion. This has now changed, as I discovered by accident when I shared a note on Twitter, then viewed it in my twitter account. There, in broad daylight! I saw the amazon kindle link. If you have trouble finding your Amazon Kindle page, click the amazon link – it’ll start with amzn.com – in your tweet. You’ll notice that your highlights are all public. You can edit the privacy settings of your notes once you’re logged into to your Amazon Kindle page)

Now you know you have your personal Kindle page which lists your books and your highlights, and you know how to access this via your internet browser.

So, the next step is to set up some automation so that when you highlight some text in the Kindle book you’re reading and share it, that highlighted text and your added brilliant comment will automatically be sent to a particular note in Evernote which collects all your pithy observations about this book.

Here’s what will happen

Once you’re set up, here’s what will happen:

1. as you’re reading a text on your Kindle or Kindle app, you come across a word or sentence you want to remember. You select the text. (Actually, selecting text is optional. I do, because I want a reminder of what I’m referring to in my note, but it’s not necessary.)
2. in the little popup window that, erm, pops up, you tap the “share” icon.
3. in the “Share” window, you type or paste the hashtag you’ve chosen to identify the book you’re reading (this is necessary for Evernote). I’m reading Valerie Lawson’s “Mary Poppins, She Wrote” and my hashtag (because I wasn’t sure if you can use multiple, separate words in one hashtag or not) is #marypoppinsshewrote. You can then add a note or comment, or not (and you can always edit this later on your Amazon Kindle page).
4. Tap “Share”.
5. That’s it! You’ll notice that the text you selected is now highlighted and there’s a little blue icon next to it. If you tap it, you’ll see the note you shared; it’s stored on your device as well as sent to the “cloud”, i.e. Amazon’s Kindle page.
6. You can now see your highlight and/or note on your Amazon Kindle page, in your Tweets, and in your Evernote.

 Setup

1. You’ll need an Evernote account, a Twitter account, a Kindle or Kindle app (I use Kindle app for iPad), an Amazon.com account (or a way to login there), and finally an account at IFTTT.com
2. First, set up your Twitter account. You just need an email address you can access. Once you have an account, go into the settings –> Security & Privacy and make sure your Tweets are unprotected. This reduces your privacy to a certain extent, but protected Tweets cannot be forwarded to Evernote: “Embed code is not available for Tweets from users who choose to protect their Tweets.” (From the Twitter help page.)
3. You can test your Tweets now, if you wish, tho it won’t show up in Evernote yet. Just select some text in your Kindle or app, and share it.
   1. It’s not necessary to actually write your note first by selecting the “note” icon rather than the “share” icon. Notes shared are automatically saved as notes in the app.
   2. It’s not necessary to add a note, except of course to share your wit and wisdom with the world.
   3. It’s not necessary to add a hashtag, unless you want to use it to share your tweets on this topic with others reading the same book. HOWEVER, a hashtag is very useful for telling Evernote to append this tweet to a particular single note.
4. Next, set up your Evernote.
   1. Create a note for the book you are reading or going to read. After much thought, I titled mine “book notes for Mary Poppins, She Wrote”.
   2. I tagged it with tag:”book notes”
   3. I’m slowly moving my notes from my 59 notebooks into a handful of notebooks, and my catch-all notebook for processed notes is “Archives”. It doesn’t matter whether you assign the note to a notebook or note. Just remember which notebook you put it in, or leave it in your default notebook. Then IFTTT will find it.
   4. If for some reason IFTTT can’t find your note (for example, because you forgot you assigned it to the Archive notebook, and designated the default notebook instead), it will create a new note in the default notebook, and so you will have two notes with the same title, and future tweeted notes will be appended to the note that IFTTT can find. No biggie, but better to avoid confusion.
5. Next step is to set up IFTTT to automatically send your Tweets to an Evernote.
   1. Once you’ve created an account at IFTTT.com, there are 2 ways to create this automated action (called a “recipe” in IFTTT).
      1. Find a recipe that someone else has already created that does what you want
         1. in your Dashboard, click “Browse”.
         2. Here’s my recipe: feel free to use it This will append your tweets to a designated Evernote.
      2. Or create your own: from your dashboard click “Create” and follow the instructions.
      3. The “Title” field in the IFTTT recipe should be the exact title of the Evernote you should have already created to collect these tweets. I use a single Evernote for one book.
      4. You can assign a notebook and tags. If you’ve already created the Evernote, assign the appropriate notebook and tag. (If you make a mistake, IFTTT will create a new note in the default notebook).
      5. Unfortunately, you can’t get IFTTT to prepend to a note, so that the most recent ones appear at the top of the note, like posts on a blog. Or at least I couldn’t see this option, nor find an existing recipe that does this. Don’t ask me to make one: I’m someone who thinks “python” is a long-assed snake.

If you are the geeky kind and know that “python” is not just a snake, then you might like Evernote ambassador and SF writer Jamie Rubin’s geeky and long-assed post on how he gets his Kindle book notes and highlights into Evernote AUTOMATICALLY. He referred to Michael Hyatt’s post:

Michael Hyatt has good instruction for one method for getting Kindle notes into Evernote, but it requires manual effort, and what I am looking for is something that is automated, that just works as part of the normal routine without taking any special steps. In fact, what I want is something like this:

I read a book on my Kindle device, and make highlights along the way… When I plug my Kindle into my computer to charge it, some process automatically updates Evernote with the notes and highlights I’ve taken since the last update. I get one note for each book

via Going Paperless: Prototype: Automatically Send Kindle Notes and Highlights to Evernote | Jamie Todd Rubin

However, it is not for me, as:

It only works for notes taken on a Kindle device. If you take notes on, say, the Kindle App on your iPad, and then sync across devices, the My Clippings.txt file on the Kindle device is not updated with those notes. They are stored separately in the cloud.

My Kindle took a bath years ago, so I now use exclusively my iPad’s Kindle app. So Rubin’s script wouldn’t work for me anyway, even if I understood it.

Do you have a way to get your Kindle notes into another app? Do you have a way to share iBooks notes and highlights? Did you find this article useful? Let me know in the comments.