I posted a question about this late last night and got an informed response for us to followup. Here’s the response and the link below. I looked at the various importer type plugins and interfaces, there is value in a solution to the state change and persistence challenge. Wouldn’t it be great if we all read books completely, one at a time, and never changed the highlights again:)
Here’s my inquiry:
I see several examples of plugins that import annotations and highlights from sources like books or pdfs (i.e. zotfile, readwise, kindle). They all automate the load, a book for example, into a note. But what if the source changes? Say an annotation or highlight is deleted or added to on the source side. What can a plugin do to an existing note to manage this state change? And, furthermore, what if there are links to and from Obsidian notes that need to be dealt with in this process?
And response from Koala:
If you keep separate source notes you could just overwrite, but then you’d lose potential block references from other notes. Unless you hash the highlights of your imports and will always know that if the hash is the same, the highlight is the same. And if you don’t want to store these hashes in a database, you could use them as block refs. Then you could still overwrite the files each time, so you’d get everything updated but wouldn’t lose the links from other notes. I suppose the hashes could also be limited to the first ten characters depending on how big the source files are/how many highlights go into a file. I think @argentum (she/her) does it that way in the new version of her mdnotes plugin (for zotero), the source notes are a concept from @bri (they/m), at least I got that idea from them.