How to take book notes from paperbacks (without typing)

A simple hack to take notes from books and upload them to your Second brain

This is my personal library. There is nothing I like more than a paper-bound book. The smell, the tactile feel, and the colourful spines give me a jolt of pleasure every time I look at my shelves! It is my most prized possession.

But I always struggled to convert my massive notes and highlights into my digital Second brain. Most of the books I read are geared towards learning new skills or improving my life in any shape or form, and it is easy to forget what I learned as I read so many. I take massive amounts of notes and it quickly turned out difficult to deal with them.

I used to spend hours copying quotes from my readings into a paper commonplace book, but this method lacked the searchability I’ve learned to rely on with digital notes. Now I do most my reading on Kindle, and my highlights automatically export to my Notion Second Brain.

But when I get the odd paperback, or borrow books from the library, I still have to deal with converting my notes to digital text.

Did you know there’s is a tool that can deal with that for you? And it’s totally free!

Easily convert quotes to text

The tool I use is a free app developed by Google, called Lens.

Essentially, this app allows you to snap a picture of almost anything you see and it will search the web based on your image. I discovered it while trying to identify some house plants I had just acquired.

Turns out that you can snap a picture of some text, and it can find the source of, say, a specific quote online. But I also noticed that when you create your image, you can highlight and select text directly from the image.

So I discovered that instead of manually typing quotes from my books, I can just snap a picture, highlight and copy to text, then paste it into my digital notes app. Easy peasy!

It saves me literally hours of manual work for a single book! (Yes, I highlight a lot…!) It is so effortless and quick that I generally do it as I read, rendering useless the upkeep of uploading my notes after the fact. No more piles of books to review!

An option for iOS

I believe that Lens is only available for Android phones. But I found a few options for iOS, this one being the best ranked at the moment of writing. You can look up scan to text in the app store to find other similar options.

Do you take a lot of book notes? How do you go about it?

And stay tuned, next week I’ll be back with another edition of the How to Beat Procrastination series! The most popular series I’ve written since starting Substack!