How to Save Quotes From Physical Books

Ebook highlights save themselves. Paper books do not.

On a Kindle, saving a line takes one long press. The highlight is stored, synced, and waiting for you.

A paper book offers no such help. You read a sentence that stops you, and then you have a choice. Fold the corner, underline it, or tell yourself you will remember.

You will not remember.

People have solved this problem for as long as they have owned books. In 1512, Erasmus advised students to keep notebooks with passages copied out under headings. The tools have changed. The goal has not: get the line out of the book and into a place you can find it later.

Here are four ways to do it, from the oldest to the newest.

1. Mark now, collect later

The simplest method works in two passes.

While you read, mark anything worth keeping. A light pencil line in the margin, a sticky tab, or a page number written on a bookmark. Do not stop to copy anything. Stopping breaks the reading.

When you finish a chapter, or the whole book, go back through your marks and collect the ones that still hold up.

The delay is a feature. Some lines that felt brilliant at midnight look ordinary a week later. The second pass filters them out.

2. Copy it by hand

Copying a passage out word for word is the oldest method, and still one of the best.

It is slow, and the slowness helps. Writing a sentence out makes you read every word of it, and it tends to stay with you longer than a quote you only marked.

Copy into wherever you keep your notes: a notebook, an index card, or straight into an app. Add the source and a line of your own on why it mattered.

The cost is time. For a book with fifty marked passages, hand copying becomes an evening's work.

3. Photograph the page

Your phone can now do what took a scribe an afternoon.

Take a photo of the page, and text recognition turns it into text you can copy, search, and edit. iPhones can pull text from photos with Live Text, Android phones with Google Lens, and many notes apps have it built in.

A few habits make the results much better:

• Shoot straight on. Hold the phone parallel to the page, not at an angle.
• Use good light. Daylight or a bright lamp, with no shadow from your hand or phone.
• Flatten the page. Hold the book open firmly so the text near the spine does not curve.
• Get close. Frame the passage you want, not the whole spread.
• Read it back. Recognition is good, but not perfect. Check names, numbers, and anything you plan to quote in public.

One photo often holds more than one good passage. When it does, save each passage as its own entry. A single entry holding three unrelated quotes is hard to find and hard to reuse.

4. Read it aloud

If your hands are busy or the passage is short, dictate it. Most phones transcribe speech well. Read the passage aloud, then add the source.

This works best for a sentence or two. For longer passages, a photo is faster and more accurate.

Always keep the source

Whatever method you use, record where the quote came from. At minimum:

• The author.
• The book's title.
• The page number.

The page number feels optional until the day you want to check a quote, or show it to someone, and cannot find it again.

The source also protects you from a common problem. Quotes drift. Words get smoothed, attributions slide to someone more famous, and a line you saved becomes something the author never said. A quote with its book and page attached can always be checked.

Add a line of your own

Under each quote, write one sentence of your own. Why did this stop you? What does it connect to? What would you say back?

Years later, that sentence is often the most valuable part of the entry. It turns a quote into a thought, and a collection of quotes into a commonplace book. (For more on that difference, see commonplace book vs journal.)

Where xotes fits

xotes is built for exactly this workflow.

Scan turns a photo or PDF of a page into text you can edit. On the free plan you get two Scans a month; Core and Pro give you more.

Split, on Core and Pro, turns one scanned page into several entries. Highlight each passage yourself, or tap Suggest splits and xotes proposes where each passage begins and ends, word for word, for you to adjust. Text you do not select is left out. A couple of taps later, each passage is sorted into its own entry with a suggested title, category, and tags, ready for you to review and edit before anything is added to your book.

Every entry has a field for the source, so the book and author stay attached. And if your reading is split between paper and screen, you can import your Kindle and Readwise highlights into the same book. On Pro, Readwise highlights sync in automatically every day.

Journaling is unlimited on the free plan. (See how it works.)

"Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Francis Bacon, Of Studies (1625).