Highlights You Can Actually Get Back Out Again
Most highlights are never read again. Not because the reader lost interest, but because getting them back requires opening the book, remembering roughly where they were, and scrolling — which is more work than re-reading the chapter.
A highlight is only worth making if it can leave the book. That single test explains why colour-coding matters, and why export matters more.
Colours are a filing system, not decoration
Multiple highlight colours are useful exactly when you decide in advance what each one means, and useless otherwise.
A scheme that survives contact with actual reading needs at most three:
- One colour for things I want to quote.
- One for things I disagree with — the most valuable category, and the one people forget to mark.
- One for things I did not understand, to return to.
Four or more and you start hesitating at the moment of marking, which is exactly when hesitation costs you the thought you were having.
Export, and what the file contains
Highlights export to a plain .txt file. It opens with the book title, the export timestamp in yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm form and a total count, then lists the highlights grouped by page number in ascending order.
Plain text is a deliberate limitation and an advantage. It cannot represent colours or nested structure. It can be opened in twenty years by anything, pasted into any note-taking app, searched with any tool, and committed to a repository. A proprietary format would carry more and outlive less.
Because the export is grouped by page, it doubles as a rough map of where your attention went. A chapter with fourteen highlights and one with none is telling you something about the book.
Do this before you need it
Export at the end of a book, not when you eventually want the quotes. Two reasons, and the second is the one that bites.
Highlights live in the app’s own storage, alongside your reading progress. They are not inside the EPUB file. Copy the book to another device and you have moved the text and left the marks behind. Uninstall the app and they go with it — this is the same storage boundary that makes backing up a library a two-part job, where the files and the reading data have to be saved separately.
The second reason: highlights are anchored to a file. Replace a book with a better-typeset edition of the same title and the marks do not follow, because the app has no way to know that page 84 of one file is page 91 of another.
So: finish the book, export, keep the text file with your notes. It takes ten seconds and it is the only version of your reading that is not hostage to an app.
A note on what to mark
The common failure is marking too much. A chapter with thirty highlights has, functionally, none — you have transcribed rather than selected, and reviewing them takes as long as re-reading.
The useful discipline is to mark what you would want to be able to say to someone else. That is a much smaller set than “this is interesting”, and it survives the year better.
If you already have a book full of unfiltered highlights, in-book search is faster than scrolling them.