Inspired by a newsletter post from Jared Newman in which he shared his new reading setup, I decided to write down how I am reading, capturing highlights, and taking notes on what I consume. So, here is my reading setup.

When I talk about reading, I distinguish between reading books, eBooks, newsletters, and articles or blog posts online. Most of the time, I am reading books, directly followed by articles and blog posts. I do have an eBook reader and a couple of eBooks in my library, however I do prefer physical books for the feeling, the haptics, and seeing and enjoying their covers on my bookshelves. While reading books, I use Readwise to capture highlights with their iPhone app, by simply taking a photo of the page on which I want to highlight something, marking the section, and saving it to my account. I am just using Readwise to its full extent since a couple of months, and it already helped me a lot when it comes to digitizing my highlights so I can directly process them in my note-taking system. Taking those highlights with Readwise made a significant difference in my whole setup, and boosted my overall workflow.

Whenever I have time, I can revisit my book highlights within the Readwise app, go through them, but also decide whether I want to keep or delete them. Capturing the highlight with the iPhone is quick and easy, so I really do not need to think about it that much. However, as Readwise is constantly resurfacing those highlights within the app, but also with personalized newsletters (you can customize the frequency of them) I get a second chance to rethink whether the highlight is worth keeping or not.

I love discovering personal blog posts and independent writing as much as I love writing for my own blog. To gather all the blog posts and articles I stumble across while browsing the internet, I use another Readwise product, which is called Reader. Readwise Reader is a beautifully designed reading app, that gives people the possibility to save articles and blog posts for later, subscribe to RSS feeds, newsletters, upload PDFs, and a lot more. With the Readwise Browser Extension, I can add new articles and blog post I stumble across with a single click. In case I decide to read the article right after saving it to Readwise, the browser extension allows me to capture highlights right on the website. However, within the Reader app, I get to enjoy a beautiful reading interface, lucid information about the author, some meta data, I get the possibility to listen to the article, I receive an AI-generated summary (which indeed is to the point most of the time), and a lot more.

Additionally, Readwise Reader gives a unique email address to sign up for newsletters and get them delivered straight to Reader instead of an email inbox. This means, you get to enjoy the same, lovely reading experience for all your newsletters too. However, since I am subscribed to a lot of newsletters with a dedicated email address already, it would take a lot of time updating my email preferences for all of them. Therefore, I applied a lovely workflow trick mentioned by Jared Newman in his newsletter post. He got faced with the same issue that I have: he did not want to re-subscribe to all his newsletter with another email address. On top of that, he has a valued point as he mentioned that he does not want to use an email address for all his newsletters, that is tied to a specific service that is not guaranteed to last forever. Therefore, Jared Newman (and now myself too) forwards the email address he has used to sign up for the newsletters to a dedicated email address provided by his RSS reader which is Omnivore, another lovely reader app, and it is open source.

I applied the same workflow since Readwise Reader also provides you with a unique email address that you can use for subscribing to newsletters. For me, the huge advantage of this setup is the following: when I subscribe to newsletters I do not only want to read them, I want to be able to engage with the writers and creators of them. Subscribing to the newsletters using the unique email address would not allow me to use it just like a regular one, it will only gather all the newsletters in a unified inbox, focusing on the reading experience. Since I subscribe to the emails with a regular email address, they land in my email client first, and then get forwarded to the Readwise Reader email. This means, I get to enjoy my favorite newsletters within a lovely user interface focused on reading, but at the same time, I can reply and engage with the newsletter writers from my regular emails client whenever I want to.

While Readwise Reader is the center of my digital reading experience, I still jump between other reading apps, just because I enjoy using them every now and then. I mentioned Omnivore already, which is a free, open-source, read-it-later app that provides you with a distraction-free interface, a privacy-focused experience, and powerful features like adding notes, highlighting, and syncing your reading list across all your devices. Besides that one, I am a huge fan of Reeder Classic by Silvio Rizzi, a super RSS reader and read-it-later client in a single app, supporting iCloud syncing across all your devices, bionic reading, widgets, reader view, and a lot more. In case you are asking yourself why it is called Reeder Classic, the reason for that is the new Reeder app, which is currently under development. It is based on the current version of Reeder Classic but rebuilt for today, giving you the possibility to not only subscribe to RSS feeds, but also pull in podcasts feeds, as well as YouTube, Mastodon, Bluesky, Glass, Reddit, and others.

Besides that, I use Refind, a service that satisfies my article and blog post needs, whenever I do not have the time to explore the web on my own. Refind aggregates articles and blog posts based on my interests, and the writers, creators, and publications I follow online. Every day, I receive a small collection of new articles. When I stumble across something interesting, I add it to Readwise Reeder so I can read it on my own timeline. Refind itself also offers a nice reading interface, however since Readwise Reader is the center of my reading flow, I am adding everything there.

As soon as I finished reading an article or blog post and gathered some highlights with Readwise Reader, I create a new note in my note-taking system with the title of the article (I do the same thing whenever I finished a book). Most of the time, I process the article and the highlights within my note-taking system right after I read it, but sometimes I add it to my backlog and tag it accordingly, so whenever I have some free-time, I go through the backlog, open the article in Readwise Reader, copy over the highlights, and start taking some notes. While doing that, I try to create as many connections to other notes in my system as possible. This has been the most important workflow to come up with new ideas to write about. Just like Morgan Housel said Most good writing is a byproduct of reading.

Besides reading a lot digitally nowadays, I still love holding a physical book in my hands, relaxing either inside on the sofa, or outside somewhere in the nature, reading that book. To keep track of all the books I own and the ones I would like to add to my personal library, I am using two apps at the moment. The first one is Book Tracker by Simone Montalto. Book Tracker is lovely, privacy focused app for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, to manage your digital library, keep track of your reading progress, and save your favorite quotes. I use for the first two mentioned use-cases. So, far it has been a joy adding all the books I own to Book Tracker and building up my personal digital library. To add a book, you can either search online through Book Tracker's catalogue, scan the bar code of the book, or simply add it manually. Once you have added a bunch of books to your library and wishlist, updated some reading progresses, and rated some of the books you have read, Book Tracker provides you with a large set of stats and statistics, gorgeously visualized in a beautiful UI.

Although I found a lot of books that I own with Book Tracker's library, I did not find all of them. Depending on the catalogue Book Tracker is using, you may find the books you are looking for or not. Based on that, I started using a second app to keep track of the books I own, and the ones I would like to buy. The second app is called Sequel, and it is built by Romain Lefebvre. Compared to Book Tracker, Sequel is a full-fledged media tracker, that not only allows you to keep track of your books, but you can track movies, series, and audiobooks with it too, all in a single place. Sequel also provides you with a beautiful interface, and some lovely features like creating collections, personal notes, or release reminders. Some of the books I did not find within Book Tracker I then found in Sequel, but also vice versa. This, besides me just adoring both apps, is the reason I am currently using both apps simultaneously.

Well, that is it. That is my reading setup, and how I am processing the highlights I created while reading.

Photo by Olena Bohovyk on Unsplash / Design by myself using Prismatic Generator by Jacob Waites