From the books you read to your vision board: creating your own core memories

Reading a book again is a great way to retain more of its knowledge. Those of us pressed for time may instead opt to make bookmarks and highlights on an electronic ebook reading platform, like Koreader.

Press and hold, then drag to select text, which you can then highlight or annotate.

This is core functionality of Koreader.

I'll explain how I built on this to replace doomscrolling with re-reading quotes from books I loved to better retain their contents and improve my mental health.

The plugin

To sync these highlights, I made a plugin.

The hard part was the addon, not the web panel you'll see below.

Since the keyboard on ereaders is touchscreen and inconvenient to say the least, I've made it simple to pair.

Once paired, it syncs all your reading activity and highlights.

The panel

Now, you are able to see highlights, annotations, bookmarks (the whole page is treated as a highlight), and reading statistics. You can see here that I have almost a decade of reading statistics. I don't think any piece of technology has lasted this long except for a Yubikey.

Get the code

Stay tuned for the spaced repetition Android app. I was going to use NeuraCache but decided to complicate the field further by making my own implementation. (Kidding, I just wanted more instant sync)