r/readwise

I’m researching a problem around physical books and reading workflows.

Kindle, Reader, and web highlights flow nicely into Readwise and Obsidian. But physical books still require manual typing, photos, or messy OCR. I’m exploring a non-destructive scanning workflow that could turn physical books into OCR text, quotes, highlights, or Markdown.

I’m curious:

1. Do you read physical books but wish the highlights could end up in Readwise/Obsidian?

2. Is full-book OCR valuable, or are highlights and quotes enough?

3. What export format would you actually use?

ok so I m a big reader. nonfiction mostly. and I ve spent genuinely embarrassing amounts of time trying to fix how i read.

current setup: book open, notion for notes, readwise getting highlights, anki waiting for cards ill never actually make, and use Internet for when i completely lose the thread & then obsidian sync.

the app switching alone frustrates me. ill be mid chapter, have a thought, open notion to write it down, forget what i was thinking, go back to the book, reread the last two paragraphs, have the thought again, get distracted by the notion tab, and now its been 20 mins and ive read one page.

and then a week later someone asks me about the book, i have nothing. like genuinely nothing. not because i didnt read it. because the reading and the thinking never happened at the same time. they happened in different apps at different times and the connection just got lost somewhere between them.

does anyone else have this problem or have you guys actually figured out something that works. not looking for generic advice just genuinely curious what other peoples setups look like who has this problem?

For folks who read a lot, where do you go to talk about ideas that spark your curiosity? Any platforms or forums that you use?

I find that this kind of learning can be a bit of a lonely pursuit if one doesn't have an appropriate social group. And most of the platforms we have today are not suitable for genuine, open-minded conversation about ideas.

I've been using RW's Mastery feature (the Q&A spaced repetition mode) for a while (created >1k flashcards), but I always found it slow to actually write good flashcards from my highlights or came back to a poorly written one I didn't like.

My old workflow would be to copy the content into ChatGPT or Claude and paste the results back into RW... but that was still too much friction.

So I built a small Chrome extension to help.

How it works:

- Suggest mode - on any highlight's Mastery editor, click "✨ Suggest Q&A cards" to get 2-3 AI-generated flashcard suggestions based on the highlight text and your note. Each suggestion includes the Q&A pair, and a concrete example you can use.

- Improve mode - if you're editing a highlight that already has a Q&A Mastery card, the button switches to "✨Improve this card" and clicking it will produce 2-3 suggests to make the flashcard better based on what you already have.

Suggestion Mode - Q&A Suggestions

Improve Mode - Improve an existing Q&A mastery card

Calls either Anthropic or OpenAI's API directly from your browser using your own API key.

Happy to answer questions. Would love feedback from other users who use the Mastery feature a lot.

Open source if you want to see the code/prompt etc: github.com/Scarvy/readwise-mastery-assistant

P.S Count this as my feature request to have something like this built directly into RW as well :)