This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Let me talk about my own reading method.
From reading, to taking notes, to reviewing, I’ve built up a few thoughts and experiences at every stage of the reading process, so I’m sharing them all in one go in this article. Of course, these are just my personal take at this stage, for your reference. I hope these methods help you read more good books and get more joy out of reading.
There are quite a few details, so I’ll break it down into 7 questions—
Q1: Paper books or e-books?
These days I almost exclusively read e-books. Even when a publisher hasn’t released an electronic edition, I’ll make one myself from the paper book. I’ll explain how below.
The biggest advantage of e-books: making excerpts and taking notes is just ridiculously convenient—you underline something on the screen, add your thoughts and comments, then use the note-export function that pretty much every e-reading app has. Export the notes, and the first draft is done.
I take a lot of notes when I read nonfiction, so this advantage matters enormously. Serious readers all say paper books are the only way to get the feeling, the style, the whole vibe—but I’m happily giving up all that vibe.
E-books have another big advantage: you can not only read them, you can listen to them. I’ve finished half my books while cooking (I’m the family chef) and walking the dog (also the family’s only manual labor). That lets me use a huge amount of fragmented time. Serious readers will say reading needs to leave a deep impression, so you should use your eyes, feel the paper with your hands, control your own pace, and stop to think along the way. Fair enough—but the content only stays with you if you can actually fit reading into your life.
That’s all true, but it’s really a trade-off: there’s only so much reading time. Do you want to read one book once and imprint it on your brain, or read several books? At this stage, I’d rather sacrifice some depth of memory for breadth of reading and get through more books in limited time. Besides, the note-review method I’ll discuss later has my back. Worst case, I’ll review things a few more times.
Serious readers also look down on audiobooks for one important reason: “Listening is passive.” You can’t freely control the depth and speed of your reading.
But passive listening has one benefit serious readers tend to overlook—it helps us get over the entry barrier of many books. Some literary fiction takes a long time to get going; a book with 20 chapters might not become unputdownable until chapter 10. If I flip through a book like that myself, I may lose patience after a few pages. Listening is less effort: the voice in my ears half-forces me into that literary world. For quite a few literary works, I first listened to the opening chapters, then realized how tragic it would have been to miss them simply because I couldn’t get through the slow beginning. If I had read those books myself, I might not even have made it to chapter two. So audiobooks can greatly expand the range of what we read.
That brings us, via audiobooks, to the second question—
Q2: What software should you use for audiobooks?
These days, e-reading apps generally include audiobook functions. The one currently getting the best reviews is WeRead’s audiobook feature, because at first listen its voice sounds incredibly human—very sci-fi. But after using it, my personal feeling is that WeRead’s audiobook feature looks better than it works. In pursuit of realism, it distinguishes stress and intonation within a sentence too dramatically. The realism seems higher, but at the same speed, the content is actually harder to hear clearly.
Once you get used to audiobooks, you turn the speed way up—far faster than normal human conversation. At that point, what we need isn’t a voice that sounds human; we need every word to land effortlessly. WeRead isn’t especially good at that.
So which app is better? I currently use Xunfei Audio.
Xunfei Audio’s AI voice doesn’t try quite so hard to sound human, which is actually an advantage for fast listening. Compared with other apps, its speed can be adjusted extremely high. I don’t know why so many apps are so stingy with audiobook speed—I find even their maximum too slow. Xunfei Audio can really take off. I currently listen at speed 60, which is enough; I can’t keep up with the full speed of 100.
Xunfei Audio’s weak point is that it isn’t very friendly to the common e-book format EPUB, so I convert my e-books into plain-text TXT files and import them into Xunfei Audio.
So, my complete process, starting with buying a book, looks like this:
I first buy the e-book from the Kindle store and download it into the Kindle software on Windows. Then I use Calibre, an e-book management program, to convert the book in my Kindle library into a TXT document, and import it into Xunfei Audio.
As for how to use Calibre to process Kindle e-books, I won’t get into that here. The internet is overflowing with tutorials on format conversion.
Sticking with audiobooks, this leads us to the third question—
Q3: How do you take notes while listening?
Taking notes while listening is, of course, a bit more of a hassle. So for now I read knowledge books—including psychology books, my old professional territory, and various popular-science books—because those require a lot of notes. The books I listen to are mainly literature, stories, and history, where there’s less to note down. That calls for a fairly relaxed solution.
What solution?
Siri！
While I’m tossing a wok around and cooking, I may suddenly hear a great line in my earphones. Then I’ll yell, “Siri, write ‘XXXX’ in Notes!” XXXX is the keyword from that great line, and Siri creates an entry in the Notes app on my iPhone. When I have time that evening, I open Notes and add the details to the e-book.
Paired with audiobooks, this method is more than enough for lightweight note-taking. I’ve tested it myself.
Here comes question four—
Q4: How do you turn paper books into e-books?
If a work of literature has no electronic edition, my advice is simple: just read the paper book.
But what if a knowledge book requires lots of notes and also has no electronic edition?
We turn it into a PDF.
Time to bring out the first miracle tool: the vFlat phone app.
All you need is a simple phone stand. Fix the phone in place with the camera facing down, open the book, and turn the pages one by one. vFlat can almost completely automate photographing every page, while correcting distortion and enhancing the images, then export a PDF with one tap. A whole book goes from paper to PDF in 15 minutes.
After exporting the PDF, we bring out the second miracle tool: ABBYY FineReader PDF 15.
This is Windows desktop software, and the strongest OCR software I’ve used by far. OCR means recognizing text in images. The PDF vFlat just created is essentially a pile of images, so the text can’t be selected. Only after OCR can we underline and annotate that text.
Plenty of software now claims to use AI algorithms for OCR, but in my experience ABBYY 15 still delivers the best results. Its text-recognition accuracy is extremely high, with almost no typos.
At this point, a paper book has become an e-book that you can underline and annotate.
Then I use Xiaomi’s Duokan Reading app on my iPad to read the finished PDF book. There may be better PDF readers on the market, but after you take notes, Duokan Reading can send all your underlines and annotations to your email with one tap. Very practical—that’s mainly the feature I care about.
Now let’s move on to the next question—
Q5: How do you preprocess notes?
Most e-reading apps now support exporting underlines and annotations, but there’s a small problem: the exported notes usually come with some labels that get in the way. To make later review easier, it’s best to remove them.
For example, here are notes exported from two random passages I underlined in the Kindle edition of The Life of Ang Lee:
See? Every note has a line of information above it like “Annotation X—location XX.” How do we remove it?
Open the notes in Word, open the Find and Replace dialog, and enter the first few characters shared by the labels we want to remove. We enter “Annotation,” followed immediately by *^13.
This means: find every line that starts with the two characters “Annotation,” followed by any content.
Then click “More” in the lower-left corner, check “Use wildcards,” and click “Replace All.”
And there we are: the extra labels have disappeared, leaving clean, tidy notes:
That completes the note preprocessing. After that, you can import the notes into software for managing and storing them, then adjust the formatting, improve them, and review them.
So the next question is—
Q6: What software should you use to manage and store notes?
The software I currently use to store my reading notes is the strongest note-taking app on earth—Notion.
I don’t just use Notion to manage reading notes. I also use it to manage information about movies and TV shows I’ve watched, various projects I’ve worked on, recipes I’ve collected online, invoices, and manuals. Notion is now the general manager of my information.
Notion has one killer feature that crushes other note-taking apps: databases. It uses databases to manage information, making everything especially easy to query and search, while related information can be linked and cross-referenced.
Here’s a partial screenshot of the “Books Read” database in my Notion—
Isn’t this incredibly soothing for an obsessive-compulsive mind?
Searching this database is especially convenient. I can instantly find books I read during a particular period, or filter out books of a certain type or with a certain rating.
I can also click an author’s information to enter that author’s page, where I can link to every book by that author that I’ve read—
More importantly, when I open each book’s page, the main content is the reading notes I preprocessed in the previous step and imported:
—See? There’s a clickable table of contents, and the layout is clean and tidy. The images, of course, were added after I imported the first draft of the notes. I also do all the note formatting directly in Notion.
Once the notes are organized, I can add other people’s book reviews, reading reflections, and so on right on this page. Very convenient.
Let me casually show you a screenshot of my Notion game database—
Ever since I got Notion, Mom no longer has to worry about my obsessive-compulsive tendencies.
Notion is ridiculously powerful. Strong recommendation. It takes a little time to learn, but once you do, you’ll never want to be without it. There are lots of tutorials online; in fact, a few days of tinkering is enough to get the hang of it. It’s just not very intuitive at first, not difficult to learn.
The problem with Notion at the moment is that it has no official Chinese version and no servers based in mainland China, so the connection is sometimes unstable. It’s entirely cloud-based: no internet, no Notion.
Don’t ask me why my Notion connection is so stable—I have no idea either (^_^). If you can’t maintain a stable connection to Notion’s servers, there are alternatives available in China right now. Wolai is one example, and Evernote has also rolled out similar features. There are several knockoffs on the market, so picking one to replace Notion shouldn’t be a big deal.
And now we come to the final question—
Q7: How do I review my notes?
It’s the same principle: reading them and thinking as you go might work best, but I still listen to mine.
These days, I split my reading evenly between books and audiobooks, but when it comes to reviewing notes, it’s “90% listening, 10% reading.”
That’s also why I previously included the step of removing the markers that keep appearing throughout the notes. If listening meant getting a “highlight XXXX” every few sentences, it would be incredibly annoying.
Since we’re talking about listening, it’s time to bring out “iFlytek Voice” again: in Notion, I select all my finished notes, save them as a txt document, and upload it to iCloud. That way, I can import the notes into “iFlytek Voice” on my phone and review them anytime. That’s how I listen to my notes wherever and whenever I want.
Reviewing notes with your eyes is of course more effective, but you can’t beat the sheer volume of my repeated listening and constant reviewing.
Reading is delicate work, but my choice is simple—when in doubt, brute force.
By: Zhichao Wei
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