Hi, I have been thinking about different use cases and trying to move over some of the material I have in other note taking apps.
One popular use case of Obsidian appears to be note taking while reading books or articles. PDF documents are supported, but other ebook formats, first and foremost EPUB is not. Considering that an increasing amount of academic literature is published in this format, and of course most fiction and non-fiction ebooks are already available as, or can be converted to, EPUB, I hope that support to embed this format is going to be considered in the short- to mid-term.
Oh, I must have missed it on the Discord server. Yes, hopefully it is going to be implemented - at least via a plugin. Eventually, it would be great if we could highlight text to easily ‘export’ into a note as well. Well, one step after the other…
Epub support would be killer. I hardly think of it because I don’t think very highly of a lot of desktop apps for it, but yeah. I think this is a great idea.
You can also highlight and annotate in an epub reader/manager, like Calibre or MarginNote, then export those to Obsidian.
Not a direct integration per se but worth letting apps that already handle media deal with it rather than turning Obsidian into a kitchen sink. What’s next? Native mp3 and mp4? Just saying it would benefit us all if the core devs continue to focus on the core value prop.
</end mini-rant>
If we have PDF support (which is probably going to improve in the future), epub support is a likely feature as well.
Obsidian is still in beta, so of they got other things to worry about, but I wouldn’t rule out the epub possibility so easily. Its not something I see as a high priority, but if announced, it sure wouldn’t make me raise an eyebrow like an mp3/mp4 addition would. Its not even in the same ballpark.
However, your point is noted that Obsidian wouldn’t be do good to just add every little thing. I just don’t see epub support in the distant future as a necessarily pointless addition.
I do agree with you that if it adds value then ideally the team would take it on. As a pure epub reader I don’t see it but having a reader with tightly integrated highlighting and annotation then that could be something. That said there are enough solutions out there that it would be a big lift just to get to feature parity.
@shindakun Do you happen to have a gist or repo with your work on integrating this with Obsidian? I’d be happy to have a look at turning it into a plugin.
I actually lament that Zotero doesn’t deal with digital book designs (epub, mobi,…) better - for example showing their symbol like pdf; ordering them, and so forth, however the Zotero biological system actually has so many more pluses than minuses that it’s an easy decision for me
It would be nice to have an EPUB book library in Obsidian, so all my resources stay in one place. It’s easier to read, take notes and link books to other notes, all within my Obsidian vault.
Obviously there are many external EPUB reading apps, but I don’t want to rely on external services and servers to store my books, also I don’t want those services to spy on my reading behaviors and notes (most of them do that). After web clipper release, Obsidian is the only app I use for everything including reading, writing and many more things.
Proposed solution
For a start, just the ability to see (currently EPUB’s are not visible in vault folder), open and read EPUB files would be great.
Current workaround (optional)
There are some community plugins for reading EPUB’s already, but they have not been updated for over 2 years. I also try not to rely on external plugins because of safety reasons (especially if the plugins are not consistently updated and monitored).
Seeing as the latest update adds an integrated pdf reader, I’d like to ask for an integrated EPUB reader (partly because that’s the file format I use more often, and more importantly because it has much better support for text)
Use case or problem
Currently I open the epub I’m reading in another app/separate window, and half the time I’m adding my own commentary or questions, whereas the other half I’m just copying and pasting highlights as they are.
It would be better if I could read the epub in obsidian, to highlight and add annotations in the app.
Proposed solution
Add an integrated epub reader that allows for highlights and annotations.
Equally important, add an option to skim just the highlights and annotations, and zoom in to the relevant section if more context is needed
Thank you, @triedmanyapps for pointing me towards this. I hadn’t seen it, in fact I had for some time given up on reading EPUB inside of Obsidian.
This one has nice features:
it is fast
it generates a boom note with TOC
Unfortunately, it does NOT do the most crucial of tasks and thus leaves most of what I need to be desired:
direct marking and annotating from book (mark line, choose annotate and scrivel away / mark line choose mark, done)
Apart from that, it would be great to present the EPUB in a transparent fashion so as to blend in with the theme. My default is dark blue on all devices and this reader is glaringly bright white.
A Epub importer into markdown would be much better. Epub is basically a compressed file with some html files anyway, should be the easiest format to convert into markdown.
