I have been using Obsidian as my sole knowledge storage system for over 2 years now.
In this period, I have spent too much time copy-pasting stuff from web articles, PDFs and Books into Obsidian and now I seek a better way.
So far, the best way I could find is Readwise Reader. It allows me to import PDFs, EPUBs, articles, tweets and even videos into its reader and whatever I highlight conveniently gets exported into Obsidian through the plug in. It is frictionless and allows me to spend more time reading/interacting with my ideas.
My question to you all is this. Have any of you found a better system in general? Is there some other software or workflow I am not aware of? I am just trying to explore all the good options before I settle with Readwise. As great as Readwise is, I am personally wary deeply integrating my workflow with cloud based apps. Its subscription prices are pretty expensive for me as well.
All above listed import methods are covered by plugins as far as i can tell.
“Annotator” works well for epub and pdf,
There are several plugins to navigate the web from inside Obsidian, (i have no use for such plugins, therefore i don’t remember their names )
you can download website content by simple copy pasting urls with “extract url content” and this isn’t the only one with similar features and so forth. Also, browser extensions can download websites in markdown.
Another route is to write new plugins, covering all the features we need. A plugin able to do all of the above mentioned is better covered by external software (applications, not plugins) because of its complexity and also performance-wise. It would be difficult task, tecnically, plus time consuming to maintain
I think Obsidians plugins are amazing both in quality and quantity and in my opinion, are a valid route to cover a multitude of individual needs.
In addition, plugins are nicely integrated into Obsidians ecosystem