Somebody wrote "Not to sound rude, but how can one judge what idea one needs to see as 'important' while skimming through the book if they have no clue of what the book is about?" and then deleted it. I'd still like to reply because it's a good question. Here goes...
That's a perfectly good question. I used to think that skimming was worthless, only something that people who didn't actually care about information did.
But if you think about how you are constantly judging the value of information everywhere throughout the entire day then you can see how we have to make some filtering decisions.
Systematic skimming is just another filter. If I'm going to dedicate 10 hours to reading the book carefully it makes sense to get an overview of the ground first. If the books I'm reading are from Alan Kay's list of greatest books you should read then I'm going to not worry so much about the filtering aspect of the skimming. If it's a shitty book with a catchy title in the business books section of the library I'm going to be much more skeptical and the filtering part of skimming is essential to not wasting time on crap.
Judge a book by its cover. Then judge it by its table of contents. Then judge it by some passages you read that looked interesting. Don't commit to a book until you've gotten a better feel for what's inside.
Thank you very much for that tip! Tried it, fell in love with it immediately. It imported my highlights from my Kindle and from my iBooks library and shows me my Highlights in a much better way than Amazon's web interface is able to do (https://lesen.amazon.de/notebook?ref_=kcr_notebook_lib)
Also, it allows me to export all of my highlights.
Finally it adds a gamification dimension, showing me random five hightlights from my books.
PS: Through this site I learned that my Kindle highlights reside in a in file called `My Clippings.txt` (in /Volumes/Kindle/documents/My Clippings.txt) This is something I always wanted to know, because I have many books I uploaded to my Kindle device via USB (so no clound sync available).
What is the format of the 'My Clippings.txt' file? The reason I am asking is because I use Google Play Books most of the time. All highlights in Google Play Books is stored in Google Docs under "Highlights _Book_Name_" and I am wondering if readwise works for those.
Unfortunately 'My Clippings.txt' is a narrowly (and honestly, pretty awfully) defined format that Kindle devices generate. So that won't work for Google Play Books.
That being said, we want to build a separate Google Play Books importing tool -- it's on our roadmap!
Also, while sometimes this could backfire, it's often useful to come to a book with some idea of what you want to get out of it and go digging for it specifically.
That's a perfectly good question. I used to think that skimming was worthless, only something that people who didn't actually care about information did.
But if you think about how you are constantly judging the value of information everywhere throughout the entire day then you can see how we have to make some filtering decisions.
Systematic skimming is just another filter. If I'm going to dedicate 10 hours to reading the book carefully it makes sense to get an overview of the ground first. If the books I'm reading are from Alan Kay's list of greatest books you should read then I'm going to not worry so much about the filtering aspect of the skimming. If it's a shitty book with a catchy title in the business books section of the library I'm going to be much more skeptical and the filtering part of skimming is essential to not wasting time on crap.
Judge a book by its cover. Then judge it by its table of contents. Then judge it by some passages you read that looked interesting. Don't commit to a book until you've gotten a better feel for what's inside.