I read a lot—fiction, history, philosophy, science, random essays, academic papers, and the occasional niche out-of-print PDF that someone scanned decades ago. Over time I’ve ended up with gigabytes of reading notes, marked-up documents, quotes I wanted to revisit, character outlines, timelines, screenshots, author interviews, and my own reflections on what I read.
At some point it stops being “notes” and becomes a personal literary archive.
A couple of people I know keep everything in a dedicated offline system. Some even use setups like VaultBook because it can search inside PDFs, images, and text files and tie everything together without relying on cloud accounts. Trying something like that made me realize just how fragmented my own reading history had become.
So I’m curious:
How do serious readers here manage their long-term reading notes and highlights?
Do you keep a physical journal? Use a digital note system? Tag everything meticulously? Organize by author, theme, genre? Or do you split it—quotes in one place, book summaries in another, research notes somewhere else?
And more importantly:
What has actually held up over years of reading?
Not the polished templates people post online, but the systems that genuinely help you find that one perfect quote months later, track recurring themes across authors, or remember how your interpretation of a book changed over time.
Would love to hear how others maintain a reading archive that doesn’t disappear into scattered files and forgotten bookmarks.
by Great_Phoenix
11 Comments
I used to keep a physical journal, but not being able to find anything made me switch to digital. I’ve started using Day One. It’s all searchable and you can make several digital notebooks if you want more topic organization, and you can add photos.
For fiction I use highlight in Kindle. You can extract and search these notes separately as a text file.
For papers I use a lot of highlights and some notes in PDF files. And they are stored in a lot of topic-oriented subdirectories.
Try One Note. It’s brilliant. It comes in the Microsoft suite. It’s like having countless digital notebooks. You create a notebook which you can then section and tab. The best part is you can put links, images, text, anything you like in the sections. It’s why I use for writing. I have the main series project, then sections for the different books, then tabs for characters, locations, outlines, research, etc.
I built an AI Tool for this. Been using it for a few months now. Makes it so much easier to pull up notes and quotes around a topic than any other strategy I’ve used.
I write them on a random notebook, forget which notebook, and read another book and move on with my life.
Vimwiki has worked the best for me.
I stopped taking notes
I feel like I just stumbled upon something that I’ve been ignorant of my entire life. People take notes when they read? I read 80+ books a year and haven’t taken notes reading a book since grad school. Of course I can’t remember what I read two weeks ago.
Use digital notebooks, then in a few years you’ll have a personal AI who can do stuff with it. You can even do it now but I don’t think the AI would remember anything beyond a few hours.
haha i don’t. i used to, then it made reading feel like homework. i’ll occasionally jot down something that really stands out and use it in my own writing… but i don’t have a system.
Back when I did this, I would use OneNote, but honestly, I found that way of reading things where I was really delving that deep to be more trouble than it’s worth. There’s so many books I want to read and if I give every single one weeks/months of research, summary, and contemplation, I won’t get to even a quarter of them. Now, most of my analysis comes from talking about it with my wife, which I honestly find way more fun.