I'm building an app to take notes on books and remember more from what you read

I would be interested in this.

Although, a web app feels like the wrong medium - I rarely have my laptop beside me when I’m reading - a mobile app would be much better.

Hey Ishan, sounds interesting. Wanted to second the Kindle integration. I have a lot of highlights that I never get back to. It'd be awesome to easily access them, and then perhaps add notes and organize them.

Hey Ishan,

Here are some thoughts for you.

For background, I read a lot of non-fiction "business books" e.g. entrepreneurship, productivity, marketing, psychology and so on. I started reading these kinds of books in my mid-20's and I think they have been more valuable than the sum of all my years of school.

I've wrestled with the problem of note-taking while reading over the years, and haven't found a good solution. I'm honestly not sure whether a good solution is even possible, and I'll explain why.

• I used to use highlights, pencil and post-it notes directly in books. As you can imagine, this isn't ideal – the books get messy, notes are hard to review or edit, etc.
• Then I started reading on Kindle. While I like how e-ink is easy on the eyes, I hate pretty much everything else. It's too slow, especially for scanning, skipping around the book which I do a lot. The UI is slow, ugly and terrible. Books are locked into the Kindle ecosystem unless you want to break DRM. The Kindle device itself is ugly. Highlighting and note-taking experience is poor.
• Then I upgraded my device to a Kobo. Slightly better UI/UX and better quality device, but all other problems remain. I still use it occasionally to avoid blue-light screens before bedtime.
• Then I started taking notes in a Word document. Good for reviewing, and for really thinking about the material. But in the end, too much work and didn't stick with it.
• Then I started reading on iBooks on the iPad. While the iBooks UI is somewhat basic, it gets the job done and is the best reading, highlighting and note-taking experience I've found so far. (I'm sad that it's such a low bar.) Also, exporting highlights and notes out of iBooks is so difficult I just don't do it which is frustrating. Also, I like to read before bedtime but avoid blue-light screen time; this is partially solved by using night shift + dimming the display.

In summary, the problem is terrible ebook reader devices/apps + books locked into Amazon/iBooks ecosystem.

So I think my ideal product would be an awesome ebook reader app on iPad with kick-ass UI/UX and highlighting/annotation capabilities that could be easily exported into a web UI or notetaking app like Evernote or Notion. But you would then have the problem of how to get ebooks into the app without resorting to piracy or DRM cracking.

Anyway, I just signed up for the beta. I look forward to seeing where Octobook goes. Of all the features, the most important to me by far is the ability to take notes/highlights, organize them, and review them.

Hope this feedback helps and good luck!

Hi Ishan!

I highly recommend you reading this post on the Shopify’s Director of Production Engineering methodology of retaining information. What he does sounds aligned with your product.
https://superorganizers.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-learning-machine?fbclid=IwAR21nXNvfpxs9zJV4_xAXy3836T9lb2ZCZUyMhy_tzvptnbs_3AK8jWQ4go

Best of luck :)

Hey some feedback,
for me a real important option would be, that I can export my stuff in a decent for mat anytime because I dont want to lose my notes :)

Looks nice.

BTW, if you ever think you need a better domain name (.com) let me know I have a unused suitable domain for this.

Might be worthwhile checking out www.readwise.io.