The Readwise Highlight Librarian

“What was the moment this product clicked?” — share yours

A voracious reader — typically a knowledge worker, researcher, writer, or lifelong learner — who realized that reading without retention is expensive entertainment. They started using Readwise because they kept forgetting what they'd read. They now have 8,000–30,000 highlights across Kindle books, web articles, PDFs, and podcasts. They do the daily review. Not every day — most days. The review takes 5 minutes and resurfaces things they've completely forgotten. Occasionally a highlight resurfaces at exactly the right moment for what they're working on. This is not magic. This is why they pay for Readwise.

• →Retain the ideas from books and articles long enough to actually use them
• →Build a reading pipeline that flows from highlight to permanent note to linked knowledge
• →Surface the right idea at the right time without manually searching their library

• —Highlight quality that's inconsistent — they highlight too much in the moment
• —and the review surfaces highlights that aren't worth reviewing
• —The pipeline between Readwise and their PKM (Roam, Obsidian, Notion) that's
• —good but requires curation they don't always do
• —Readwise Reader's features improving rapidly in ways that sometimes change
• —the workflow they've established
• —The feeling that the highlights are accumulating faster than the synthesis

• Reading that doesn't change how you think is just consuming — retention is the point
• Spaced repetition works for vocabulary; it works for ideas too
• The goal isn't a bigger highlight library — it's better thinking

Has been using Readwise for 2–5 years. Has 5,000–30,000+ highlights. Sources: Kindle (primary), Readwise Reader for web articles, manual imports for PDFs. Does the daily review 4–6 days per week. Has Readwise connected to their PKM (Obsidian, Roam, or Notion) via the official integration. Uses Readwise Reader as their read-later tool, replacing Instapaper or Pocket. Reviews their Readwise library 1–2 times per month to prune bad highlights. Has a tagging system for highlights by topic. Knows it's not maintained as well as it should be.

• →Highlight quality scoring that surfaces the user's historically-resonant highlights
• →more frequently removes the "why am I reviewing this?" friction from the daily review
• →Synthesis prompts that ask "what connects this highlight to something else
• →in your library?" extend the review from recall to active thinking
• →Reader-to-PKM pipeline that preserves document structure (chapters, headings)
• →alongside highlights removes the flat-list limitation of the current export
• →Cross-source connections that surface when a highlight from a book echoes
• →something from an article they saved last week do the linking work the
• →reader's brain would otherwise have to do manually

Pairs with `obsidian-primary-user` and `roam-primary-user` for the reading-pipeline-to-knowledge-graph workflow. Contrast with `perplexity-primary-user` for the retained-knowledge vs. on-demand-search approach to knowing things. Use with `substack-primary-user` for writers whose reading practice directly feeds their publishing.