Introduction
I use Moon Reader+ for my ebooks on my Hisense A9 e-reader. I love the app’s highlighting and annotation capabilities. However, I haven’t found a reliable way to export my highlights to my note taking app of choice. In this case, Notion. In this article, I’ll go over my workflow for exporting my book highlights from Moon Reader+, formatting the notes, and then importing them to Notion. Unfortunately, this workflow is not automated but I hope it is useful to you nonetheless.
Table of Contents
Introduction InstructionsApps usedIn the eReaderOn desktopAside. How about using Readwise?Conclusion
Instructions
Apps used
- Moon+ Reader Pro
- TickTick
- Google Docs (or your word process of choice)
- Notion (or your note taking app of choice)
In the eReader
- Open Moon Reader+ and navigate to the books whose highlights you want to export.
- While reading your book, tap the middle of the page.
- A menu of icons will appear at the bottom of the screen. Tap the one that consists of 3 dots-and-dashes, like the "bullet list" format item in a text editor. This will bring up the table of contents.
- Next to "Chapters" at the top of the table of contents, you will see "Bookmarks", tap on it. This will then show all your highlights and bookmarks.
- Tap the "share" icon that appears at the bottom left of the screen - like the top part of a Y, with knobs on it.
- Choose "Export list to file (.txt)”
- Select the TickTick app icon
On desktop
- Switch your device to your computer
- Go to TickTick and copy all of the text. Press ctrl + A (cmd + A if you’re on Mac) to select all, then copy.
- Paste the text into Google Docs or your word processor of choice
- Press ctrl + F to find all of these characters - ▪
- Press the 3 dots in the right hand corner of the find and replace box to open more options.
- Open Google docs, create a new document and paste the text
- Fill out the “Replace with” box with just an asterisk * . Make sure not to add any new characters like a space before or after either the asterisk or the square in the “find” box.
- Click replace all
- Optionally, you can replace the headers marked by the large black square diamond ◆ with ### to indicated a heading 3 in markdown (this won’t change anything in Notion as of the time I am writing this article).
- Press ctrl + A (cmd + A if you’re on Mac) to select all, then copy and paste all of the text in your Google doc to your note-taking app of choice. I use Notion
Done!
Aside. How about using Readwise?
Why don’t you use Readwise for importing the highlights? Two reasons:
- Readwise has a monthly subscription fee. I hate monthly subscriptions fees.
- You can import any old highlights, only new ones. So if I wanted to import notes from all the old books I read - I simply couldn’t.
Conclusion
Hope this helped. If I do find a way to automate this workflow in the future (which I hope I will) - I will post it here. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter to stay up to date.