Looking for the perfect reading setup

Early last year I settled on using my iPad as my default reading device. It served me well but there were a few issues with my flow that prevented the experience from being perfect. The flow was like this:

  • Whenever I found an article that I would like reading I’d save it on my Pocket account
  • Later I would login into pocket, find my latest additions, open them with Safari in reader mode and export the article to Apple Books
  • Rinse and repeat every few days

You might be wondering why I would go through such a process. The integration between Safari and Apple Books is quite handy: I can quickly get a nicely formatted document on my iPad without much hassle [1] and all the annotations and highlights are synced with the Apple Books app on my Mac. But the main reason was the pencil (and the highlighting).

image-20230224184005263
Figure. Hightlights and annotations

With the pencil I can take note or scribble small drawings that help me engage what I am reading. I can highlight in different colors using the pencil or my finger, with a quite responsive UI. I like how taking notes with a pencil helps me focus on what I’m reading while not getting so in the way as a keyboard. Using different colors when highlighting helps help distinguish between parts I consider interesting and parts I want to draw my eyes onto when skimming through the document.

But even for all the love I had for my setup there was something that finally made me gave up. At some point I had more than 800 documents in the Books app and that’s too many articles to manage without support from the application. My main frustrations where:

  • The contents of the documents are not indexed. I could only search for titles
  • Because Apple Books was crashing quite often and I had to re-import the library to fix it all the articles were marked as new and I couldn’t easily tell which documents I had pending and which not
  • I couldn’t organize the documents beyond “collections”, which are like tags. Only that one can group documents by one collection or “tag”

When complaining about my issues with Apple Books to my colleague Karthik he mentioned that he was using Reader from readwise.io. The Reader app meets almost all my needs to manage my ever growing collection of documents and the reading experience is quite good (except for the constant missing images in the imported documents). But it’s not perfect. I can only highlight with one color and I can’t use the pencil to make handwritten annotations. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a happy user of Reader and I appreciate all the work that has gone into it but I would give away many of its features for support of those two things.

I’ll keep searching for my perfect reading setup.

  1. Except for all the times that the documents where not synced because iCloud had some hiccup. And except for all the times the Books app entered some bad state and crashed, for which the only fix I found was erasing all the app state and re-syncing my library. ↩︎