Introduce a new way to retain knowledge from Kindle books

~ Joel Liu

Many Diigo users are lifelong learners and love reading books.  However, reading a book is one thing, retaining the knowledge from the book is another.  If you search “retain book” there are 122 Million results!  Many people struggle with how to better retain knowledge from books.

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Highlighting is an important way to help retain knowledge.  As Diigo users, you’re familiar with highlighting on the web, and as Kindle users, you may be familiar with highlighting on Kindle as well.
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Highlights can help to retain knowledge, but they are not enough. We still only remember the broad idea and message of a book.

“Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”  — Charlie Munger

Isolated highlights are just like the isolated facts, we don’t have them in a usable form.    

Diigo provides a 2 step method to help you make the best use of your kindle highlights.

Step 1:   Import your kindle highlights to your Diigo library.

With the new Diigo chrome extension,  it only takes one click to import all of your highlights from a book to your Diigo library.

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Step 2:  Organize highlights from a book in your own knowledge structure.

 After Kindle highlights are imported in your Diigo library,  it’s easy to add them to an outliner where you can then organize these highlights in your own structure.

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As  avid kindle users, we have used this method for a long time and found it to be a very efficient way to integrate knowledge from a book to the knowledge network in your brain.

How many highlights are sleeping in your Kindle?   Import them into Diigo and  integrate them into a latticework of knowledge network now!   

 

Here is how to do it:

  1. Update to the latest Diigo Chrome extension
  2. Visit your kindle highlights page https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook
  3. Click “Import to Diigo” button
  4. If you have highlights for personal documents on your kindle device,  you can follow instructions here https://www.diigo.com/import_all/kindle  to upload the kindle highlights file to Diigo.

34 thoughts on “Introduce a new way to retain knowledge from Kindle books”

  1. This is awesome! Thank you, Diigo!
    But how to import notes from my personal documents? (i.e. the .PDF and .mobi files that I uploaded directly to my kindle, as opposed to official ebooks bought from the kindle store)

  3. You thought of every scenario, good job! I’ll try that asap and will let you know! Thank you!

  6. Great work, Joel and Diigo! Looks good. One thing: The title of the book shows up automatically, but not the author. Also, I got an empty () in the title. Also, it would be great to add a tag / edit the import from the screen itself before it imports to the Diigo Library (like the extension). Thank you very much for this new feature!

  7. What about for non-kindle eReaders? I know I’m in the minority here but I prefer other readers so I can load other document formats. Currently using a Kobo reader.

  8. @Mark, We will fix the ()issue soon. Thanks for suggestion other features. For author names, where do you want to put it in Diigo, in tag or description field?

  9. @Mathew, Can you access the kobo reader’s highlight online or from the device? If you can get the highlights txt from Kobo reader, please send it to care [at］ diigo.com and we will try to help you import them.

  12. I see the button that says “Import to Diigo”, but nothing happens when I click it. Is there another way? I don’t have access to the “My Clippings.txt” file.

  17. Excited by this new feature, unfortunately it doesn’t work for me yet (Chrome,win10,diigo extension installed).
    When i click on the “import to Diigo” button in read.amazon.com/kp/notebook nothing happens; checking the javascript console shows Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read property ‘1’ of null at at HTMLDivElement. (diigolet.js:325)
    My main Amazon account is French but my book’s highlights are at https://read.amazon.com/kp/notebook though
    Tell me if more feedback./tests is needed, looking forward to this new feature 🙂

  21. When did you add those hyperlinks to the end of bullet points when you drag highlights to the outliner? My god! Imagine dragging hundreds of highlights from a PDF! Why would I need hundreds of the same link when they are under the same bullet header? How ugly and distracting do you think it is? Why not pop up the url upon bullet point hover? Can you make it an option to turn this thing off?

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