New-fangled note-taking

[eve_prime]

I read lots and lots of academic papers and books, far more than I reported in my "books completed" because I typically don't need to read an entire book to get what I need from it. Back when I regularly went to my office (before it moved out to the Gateway neighborhood in Springfield) I did a lot of photocopying, but that wasn't practical anymore, and I don't really like scanning with a printer, so I needed a new technique.

I decided to try - taking photographs of the paragraphs I want to save! I've been doing this most of the summer, especially since I needed to spend a lot of time with both environmental communications books and discourse analysis/rhetoric books. I photograph the page number and then the section of text I want to save, then later I go through the photos and save the text to a Skype window. Later I copy the messages from Skype into a document file and clean it up and save it (typically one file per source).

This works very well for some books, but there are other times when my Pixel phone doesn't seem to recognize that a photo contains text and doesn't offer me the option of copying blocks of text. Having to try repeatedly until the prompt comes up was wasting a lot of time... but today I discovered that the 'lens" button will let me create a prompt of my own. This will make my new technique even better!

Comments

[kaishin108]

That is great. I do a lot of things like that with my phone too, a faster easier tool!

[eve_prime]

It is ever so much nicer than either taking notes or dictating notes to my phone. Voila, all the words appear just as they did in the book! :)

[calypso72]

Oh look, I'm here! I read almost entirely in eBooks and I love being able to highlight an excerpt to save and it automatically goes into my Goodreads account. I also read a lot in audiobook format and there's no way to grab exerpts from there (and I rarely remember to look back at the eBook and find a passage that struck me while I was listening - but sometimes I do!)

[eve_prime]

Hooray, you're here!

I do read some e-books, but especially in the summer I like to sit outside to read, and I'm not sure if I could see a screen well enough for that.

My friends have got me using https://app.thestorygraph.com/ , which is an independent alternative to Goodreads. I think they don't like the Goodreads affiliation with Amazon. I don't particularly care about that, I guess, but it's fun to have people I know reading what I've said about what I've read.