Must-Read: Ezra Klein: A Better Way to Read on the Internet

Must-Read: Ezra Klein: A Better Way to Read on the Internet: “I have figured out how to read online, and it is glorious…

…Diana Kimball… developed this system for ‘a decent digital commonplace book system.’… Clippings.io will export your Kindle notes and highlights in usable, searchable form–and then plug them directly into Evernote, so they’re available whenever you need them, and sortable in every way you might imagine. The difference here is profound…. My relationship with highlighted passages and notes has gone from one in which I have to find them to one in which they can unexpectedly, wonderfully find me. A search for, say, ‘filibuster’ will call up highlights and notes I wasn’t specifically looking for, and that I had actually forgotten, but that help….

A lot of what I read, however, isn’t books. It’s news articles, blog posts, magazine features. I’ve long wanted a cleaner way to save the best ideas, facts, and quotes I come across. Now I have one. Instapaper… recently added a highlight function…. Kimball created an If That Then This recipe that automatically exports Instapaper highlights into Evernote. So now anything I highlight in an article… on Instapaper is saved into the same searchable, sortable space that my book highlights inhabit…. It’s wonderful.

But there’s one exception…. DFs are the worst…. And yet a lot of what I read is in PDF…. If anyone out there has a good solution, I’d love to hear about it.