Capture and keep excerpts and reading notes from your paper books

Last updated on 18 August 2022

How to keep excerpts from the paper books you read? How to take digital notes of your readings? It's been a while since I've been looking for a solution to annotate and keep excerpts from the books I read. There are many solutions for e-books, most e-readers even integrate it into their interface.

But how to do the same easily with paper books apart from noting or copying excerpts by hand? The solution exists. This is an absolutely great free app for your smartphone. Her name is Highlighted. Absolute crush. Essential if you have a mobile phone running iOS.

Capture, organize and re-read important parts of your books

Highlighted installed on your phone will allow you to have at hand an absolutely fantastic tool to keep an excerpt from a book that you are reading, to write down a comment or a reflection and then to be able to easily find everything when you want and where you want.

The application, designed by Damir Stuhec, an independent developer, offers an elegant, distraction-free and highly intuitive interface. It does not require any instructions for use. You install it and you can use it immediately.

As you understand, this is not aboutan eBook Reading App. Highlighted is more of a digital companion to your traditional paper book readings.

How Highlighted Works to Keep Extracts from Paper Books

Highlighted remembers all your readings. Starting with the book titles themselves. Create one sheet per book. This is very easily done either manually by typing the title, the author, etc., or even easier by scanning the book’s barcode with its ISBN from the application. In this case, the application itself fills in all the boxes on the book form. By the way, this allows you to memorise all the books you have read.

Once the card is created, you have two ways to keep a passage. You can enter it by hand with the keyboard of your smartphone. It is also a way of taking notes on the fly. Your excerpts or passages from the book and notes will thus be kept in the digital sheet of the book.

But Highlighted offers another way to keep an excerpt from your reading. You have to take a photo from the application of the flat page in which the text is located. Once the photo has been taken, the application will automatically scan the content. Select with your fingertip the sentence(s) you want to extract and validate. The application immediately creates an excerpt in your book fiche. Magical.

I needed an app that allowed me to highlight passages from books so that I could come back to them easily when needed, and that is exactly what this app does. I love it.

File quotes and share them

The app also helps you classify and navigate through all the citations stored in your personal library. You can assign "hashtags" or tags to snippets for thematic ranking. For the actual search of a passage, Highlighted offers a search engine integrated into the application. Type a word or phrase and the app will search through all of your preserved excerpts. This is very convenient.

As far as sharing is concerned, each quote can be sent in text format or as a beautiful image by email. Another nice little option, you can also share the image directly on Instagram or other social networks.

All notes can also be exported in the format txt, rtf, markdown, csv, pdf…

In the end, a very nice application that also has the great advantage of being completely free. What a pity Highlighted only exists for iOs phones. If you know an equivalent for Android, please share the reference in the comments.