The Digital Commonplace Book
Paper or screen, and the one rule that matters either way.
For most of its history, a commonplace book meant paper. A bound notebook, filled by hand, indexed with care.
Today the same practice can live on a screen. That changes what it can do. (If you are new to the practice, start here.)
The question is not whether digital is allowed. It is what you gain, what you lose, and what a good digital version actually needs.
What paper does well
Paper is slow in the good way. Writing by hand makes you choose your words, and copying a passage out helps it stick.
There is no notification, no feed, no temptation to do anything but the entry in front of you.
The cost is retrieval. A handwritten commonplace book is only as findable as its index, and most people never keep the index up.
The thing you know you wrote down becomes the thing you cannot locate.
The old keepers wrestled with exactly this. John Locke published an entire indexing method for one reason. A collection you cannot search is a collection you cannot use.
What digital does well
A digital commonplace book solves the part paper struggled with. Search.
Type a word and the entry comes up in a second, no index required.
It also captures faster, which matters more than it sounds. The whole practice depends on getting a thought down before it slips away. A tool that lives in your pocket closes the gap between the idea and the entry.
This is the same instinct behind the modern "second brain" movement. The writer who popularized that term describes it, in his own words, as a digital commonplace book.
The practice did not change. The medium did.
What a good one needs
Not every notes app makes a good commonplace book. Five things separate the ones people keep from the ones they abandon.
1. Capture in seconds. If saving a thought means opening a folder, picking a template, and filling in fields, you will save fewer thoughts. The best capture is a blank box you can write in right away.
2. A way to find things again. Search by word is the minimum. Themes matter too. A commonplace book was always organized by idea, not by date, so you need tags or categories that let you pull up everything on courage, or grief, or starting over.
3. Room for the source. A quote without its author slowly turns into a misquote. Every entry should have a place to say where it came from: the book, the page, the person.
4. A way back in. Collecting is half the practice. Returning is the other half. Some tools bring old entries back to you on their own. If yours does not, build the habit yourself (more on that in how to actually reread your notes).
5. Your words, portable. You should be able to export everything in an open format and leave whenever you want. A commonplace book is meant to last decades. Apps rarely do.
Bring in what you already have
Most people do not start from zero. They have years of Kindle highlights, a few half-filled notebooks, and a camera roll full of book pages.
A digital commonplace book can take all of it in.
Highlights. Many reading apps let you export what you have marked. Kindle keeps every highlight in a file called My Clippings.txt on the device, and services like Readwise can export a full library. A good commonplace book app will import those directly.
Paper notebooks. Photograph the pages. Text recognition has become good enough to turn most printed pages, and much handwriting, into text you can search and edit. Give anything important a quick read afterward. It still makes mistakes, especially with messy handwriting.
Pages from books. Same idea. One photo of a page can become a searchable entry, with the book noted as the source. (Here is a full guide to saving quotes from physical books.)
One caution. Importing everything at once can bury the good material under the merely highlighted. It is worth going through an import slowly, keeping what still strikes you.
The one rule that matters
Here is the line worth holding, on paper or screen.
A commonplace book preserves your voice. It keeps your words as you found them and your thoughts as you had them.
The danger with some digital tools is that they want to help too much. Summarizing your entries, rewriting them, turning what you kept into something you did not write.
That defeats the purpose. The value of a commonplace book is that it is yours, in your words, chosen by you.
A good digital version should make finding a thought as easy as having it, and otherwise stay out of the way.
How to set one up
Keep it simple. Complicated systems are the main reason digital commonplace books get abandoned.
- Pick one place. One app, one document, one notebook. A collection split across five tools is five half-collections.
- Start with a few broad themes. Quotes, ideas, observations, books. You can add more later. Too many categories on day one becomes a filing chore.
- Always note the source. Even a rough one. "Podcast, October" beats nothing.
- Write a line of your own. Under a quote, add a sentence on why it caught you. That line is often what makes the entry useful years later.
- Set a time to look back. Weekly, monthly, whatever you will keep. A commonplace book you never reopen is just storage.
Paper, screen, or both
There is no wrong answer. Some people love the ritual of the page. Some need the speed and search of a screen.
Many keep a hybrid: capture fast on a phone, copy the keepers by hand. Or the reverse: write by hand, then photograph the pages so they are searchable.
Choose by what makes you keep the habit. The best commonplace book, digital or not, is the one you fill and return to. (Here is how to start one.)
Where xotes fits
xotes is a digital commonplace book built around these five needs. Write an entry and tap Sort, and xotes suggests a title, category, and tags you can change. Find anything by keyword, tag, category, or date. Import highlights from Readwise, Kindle, or a CSV, and photograph pages with Scan. Once a day, revisit brings back one of your own entries. Export everything as Markdown, CSV, or a zip with your photos, on every plan.
Journaling is unlimited on the free plan. (See how it works.)
"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications." Vannevar Bush, As We May Think (1945).