New plugin: Readwise

arminta · April 15, 2021, 11:55pm

Ok, I did some new highlights and confirmed it’s working. Thanks!

renehernandez · April 16, 2021, 11:56am

@arminta @shabegom Yes, it’s a restriction is there for 2 main reasons:

Allowing download of all existing highlights could trigger rate limiting of the Readwise API and I haven’t implemented support for that yet (it requires more logic in terms of retrying requests, pagination, etc)
If you already have many highlights and for whatever reason don’t have the id stored as highlight_id: <id> it would insert highlights again, leading to a potential mess in your vault

stephan_k · April 30, 2021, 2:11pm

Hello Rene,

I enabled your plugin in obsidian. However, it would not sync my readwise highlights (for a test I connected it to my kindle).

I am not sure why the sync doesn’t work.

How can I get help? Thx

renehernandez · May 1, 2021, 11:03pm

Can you share the output of the Chrome Dev Tools when you run the plugin? The plugin will only try to sync things from the last time it ran (or was installed)

viticci · May 2, 2021, 1:38am

Hey Rene, thanks for making this plugin. Any idea why, once installed, the plugin does not appear (and thus can’t be configured) in the settings of Obsidian’s mobile app, currently in beta? The plugin installs just fine, but it can’t be configured.

shabegom · May 2, 2021, 2:21am

This is a problem with every plugin that attempts to add an item to the status bar.

The status bar doesn’t exist on mobile (it’s the bar at the bottom of the desktop app). Right now, a plugin that attempts to add something to the status bar fails silently on the mobile app. You’ll notice that there will be an error displayed if you try to disable the plugin.

The easiest solution would be for our fearless leader @Licat to ignore adding to the status bar on the mobile app. Alternatively, individual plugins could check that isMobile === false before attempting to add to the status bar.

Long story short, it’s a bug that affects many plugins on mobile right now.

renehernandez · May 2, 2021, 1:39pm

Good to know. I’ll add a check for it

friednslip · May 3, 2021, 9:28am

qq— I’m exporting my previous readwise highlights as one giant markdown export before I start using this— is there a way figured out how to change the datetime format in the readwise markdown export to YYYY-MM-DD? the current markdown export is in the roam format ( eg May 3, 2021).

I tried looking up how to use Jinja, but a but confused how that would look in the metadata template

renehernandez · May 3, 2021, 7:44pm

This has been fixed on version 0.0.5. Install or update to get the fix

renehernandez · May 3, 2021, 7:46pm

I believe that would need to be handled within Readwise itself, but I haven’t played with the Markdown exporter at all. I was busy building the plugin

friednslip · May 4, 2021, 7:12am

and bless you for it! I was just curious. Thank you so much for this

Sharknader27 · May 17, 2021, 6:10pm

Quick question, how does the plug-in handle page titles that have prohibited characters in them, such as “:” and “|”? (I haven’t figured out how to change how Readwise names the articles generally - only as part of specific export integrations that are officially supported by Readwise)

renehernandez · May 19, 2021, 11:08am

This function obsidian-readwise/fileDoc.ts at main · renehernandez/obsidian-readwise · GitHub is invoked to sanitize the title name

Sharknader27 · May 20, 2021, 5:09pm

Got it. Thank you for confirming!

MortimerJazz · May 21, 2021, 3:10pm

I’m really excited about this - thanks so much for your time in building this out.

I’ve just got a few questions to make sure I’m getting the most out of it.

The main one is that I’ve developed a custom template within Readwise itself to insert a few headers and stuff throughout the page which is designed to help me write up additional thoughts/notes on the books and not just purely a list of quotes. Am I right in thinking at the moment that it wouldn’t be possible to replicate this within the plugin?
Is it possible to pull in the meta data that provides an image to the highlight source (the book cover/podcast image etc)?
I’m guessing that the individual files are supposed to be filtered by tag (i.e podcast, book etc) rather than having them filtered into folders, which is typically how Readwise downloads MD files. Have I got that?

Thanks again for your time on this - much appreciated!

scottsemple · July 25, 2021, 1:53pm

Is there a way to change the destination directory for new highlights?

At present, my highlights are going to the Obsidian main directory, but I have subdirectories for new notes (i.e. /pages) in order to make Obsidian play nice with Logseq.

If not, what’s the best way to combine new highlights with old ones from the same source? (If I cut and paste the new .md file into the subdirectory, the plugin reimports the highlight.)

Thanks!

renehernandez · July 27, 2021, 10:52am

You can specify the folder where you want your highlights to be created using the Highlights Storage Path setting.

saadch · July 28, 2021, 11:17am

Hi,
Is there a way to apply actions tags on the readwise export to obsidian? (particularly header tags)
Thanks!

scottsemple · August 6, 2021, 3:35pm

Great, thanks.

One more: What’s the best way to create a list of all highlight imports per day?

In Roam, each import adds a note to a [[Readwise]] page, saying “X highlights imported for Book Y on YYYY-MM-DD.” Then those entries appear both on the [[Readwise]] page as an ongoing list and on each Daily Note page in the Backlinks section.

It’s very useful because the [[Readwise]] page can be used as a processing inbox when using new highlights in other work.

Is something like that possible right now?

Thanks!

kenanmike · August 7, 2021, 1:46pm

Sounds great! Looking forward to checking it out.
How might the use case differ from the Readwise QuickAdd workflow and the Kindle Highlights plugin? (I could guess about the latter because it doesnt involve Readwise tags etc but especially wondering about the former).

github.com

chhoumann/quickadd/blob/master/docs/Examples/Template_AutomaticBookNotesFromReadwise.md

### Template - My Book Notes template
![OoBBhFGoxl](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/29108628/122776753-ac7c4d00-d2ab-11eb-9ade-4b88afaee8e4.gif)

#### Installation
Here's a video guide for [installing user scripts in QuickAdd](https://github.com/chhoumann/quickadd/blob/master/docs/Examples/Capture\_FetchTasksFromTodoist.md#installation-video).

Basically, you'll want to create a new JavaScript file (file extension is `.js`) with the contents of the script. Then, in the script, you see the `YOUR_READWISE_TOKEN`, which is where you'll want to insert your Readwise token (find it [here](https://readwise.io/access_token)).

Now you need to create a new macro. To do so, open the Macro Manager, enter a name for it (I use `Readwise`), and then click `Add`. Then click `Configure` on that macro. Once a modal opens, select the user script you've created and click `Add`.

Once that's done, you can use the [template provided below](https://github.com/chhoumann/quickadd/blob/master/docs/Examples/Template_AutomaticBookNotesFromReadwise.md#template). If you have your own, then you can just use the `{{MACRO:Readwise::instaFetchBook}}` to insert the highlights. If you called your macro something else than `Readwise`, replace `Readwise` with that.

This template should be added to a [Template choice](../Choices/TemplateChoice.md), and should be given values that resemble this:
![Template choice setup](../Images/readwise_template_choice.png)

The template path should be the path the template made based on the one here.

Notably, the book's name would be the one selected. I have chosen to write prepend a ``{ `` before it, as I use this to denote literature notes in my vault.

The remaining settings are up to you. Activating this choice will open a menu which allows you to choose a book, and the book notes will be used appended to the template.

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