Noob Readwise question: What are the benefits of a Readwise integration?

Hi there! :wave:

I apologise in advance if my question seems to be pretty inane. I’m probably one of the few community members who are not using Readwise, and appreciate its value.

I have a basic idea of what Readwise does. I use Pocket and read books in the Kindle app (I have the Kindle Highlights plugin running in Obsidian currently. I don’t highlight a lot of passages in Kindle or Pocket, although I will add highlights if I find interesting passages.

I would also like to have those highlights be made available to me in some useful form outside Pocket and Kindle, and I understand that this is where Readwise comes in.

I guess my question is this: What is the value you receive from using the Readwise integration in Obsidian? What are the benefits, and how do you find this integration useful in the context of other notes you may take?

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This might be relevant –

The only real benefit I get from the Readwise integration is that it automates it. And if I didn’t automate it, I would NEVER remember to export my Kindle highlights.

And once it is automated, the text is there to be searched and processed. And it includes links back to the passage, so I can jump straight back into the Kindle app to find the position in the book, if I need more information.

I do occasionally read random highlights on the Readwise website.

Even with the integration, I still manually curate my book notes after they are collected by Readwise. (I roughly follow Tiago Forte’s “progressive summarization”.) And I still store separate atomic quotes in my “Commonplace Book” when a core idea strikes me. That is a separate folder in Obsidian, but I am considering staying in physical index cards.

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I don’t use it with Obsidian (yet) but the value of Readwise to me is 100% that it automates what otherwise would be a bunch of things I’d probably forget to do, and it does it in a fairly consistent way. Readwise pulls everything I highlight digitally into one place (Evernote) so I can start processing the highlights and notes.

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Awesome, thank you for your feedback @rigmarole and @djdrysdale

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