Book summaries - notes or subfolders?

[Steve_1964]

Hello all,

I am new to Obsidian and have a general question about documenting key findings from reference books in Obsidian. Should one create one note per book and summarize all chapters in this file, so that a rather long note is created or does it make more sense to create subfolders for specialized literature? I’m not sure, which approach makes more sense also in terms of specially linking notes together.

[holroy]

There are so many unknown factors to such a question, like what kind of book is it? Science or fiction? How extensive references are you likely to make? And so on.

For me the key question is how will I refer (or link) to the book? Since most of the physical books I read nowadays are self- help books, I tend to refer to the entire book, and so I would lean towards one (major) note for any given book.

This also lends itself rather easily for subdivision later on within that note, if it proves to be useful. You’ll then either land in the main note on the book, and it’ll give you what you want, or it’ll have some map to where you can find more specific information. And after it potentially was subdivided, you could then also link there directly.

In short, I would start with one note per book, and divide it later on if necessary. So structure wise I have one folder for books in general, where the book title would be the note name. If need be, I could then also create a folder with the same name for any details related to that book. (They wouldn’t clash name wise, since the note actually ends with .md)

[Steve_1964]

Thanks for your detailed reply and valuable advice!

I’m essentially reading specialist literature on the topics of corporate culture and leadership and will first follow your suggestion to create a note for each book.

The ability to divide that note later into multiple sections and then later create targeted links to topic related notes to that section sounds very interesting. That’s exactly what I need. I did some research yesterday. It seems to go via a plug in, but I can’t get it to work.

Can you give me some guidance on how to do this subdivision and then link specifically to a section in the second step rather than the whole document? That would be great.