Transcription
One. This is Dan from Readwise, and in our first YouTube explainer video, we're going to describe how to use our new export to Notion feature. So, you can see I'm on the Notion export page. For the first time, if you haven't configured it, you can find this from your Readwise dashboard if you're a full user. And the first time you come to this page, you're going to need to configure the integration between Readwise and Notion. You had just by clicking this button in order to enable this integration.
Need to add it to your browser. I'm using Brave, which is just built on Chrome, but you need either Chrome or any Chrome derivative or Firefox. Okay, this is now out. So it automatically detected my Notion account, which I've already logged in. So now, I'll walk you through each of these options. When I hit this button up here, this will start the first sync. So, before I hit that, I want to come down here and make sure it's all dialed in to my preferences. So, here are all the different Notion accounts that I have. I've got Readwise, which is our company, my personal one, and then "Under Furred," which is between me and my girlfriend. I want my Notion library to go to my personal account, so it's selected on Daniel Doyon. All right.
Then there are a few options down here. I'm the first is automatic exporting. So, what this means is every time you take a new highlight in any source, be it Amazon Kindle or Apple iBooks or Instapaper or Pocket, or you save a tweet, a variety of others, whenever those come into Readwise, this option says, should they then be exported to Notion? So, I think most people are going to want this default on. It's really cool to take a Kindle highlight on your Kindle device in the morning and then come to your Notion account and see the highlights already there waiting for you.
The next option is selecting which books and articles and tweets from your Readwise account to export. And by default, this is selected "Online," which means, you know, any books that you've chosen to never see in Readwise will also not be exported to Notion.
Next option is about showing highlight locations. So, location is a concept in Kindle akin to a page number, and this option says if you want that to export. Very handy for going and looking it up in the original source, but it does somewhat inhibit the aesthetics.
And then the next option is directly related to showing highlight locations, which is where to put those locations. "In line" means that it'll be at the end of the paragraph or the end of the highlight, whereas if I toggle this off, it'll be at the beginning. So, it might say, like, "Location 83:" and then have a passage. When I turn this on, it will instead be the passage, and then this is at the end, "Location 83." I prefer it in line, just for aesthetics.
So, now I've got my settings, and now I just need to start the export. Okay, so now it takes it to this page. Just as a fair warning, I've got like 25,000 highlights. So, the first time the export runs, it's going to take a couple of minutes just because there's a lot of data to transfer. So, you don't have to keep this window open. You can close it, and it will start exporting on its own.
Switch over to Notion and see if it's begun. All right, it has. So, the Readwise to Notion integration will create a new page by default in the private area of whatever workspace you selected. Okay, so you can see that it's now adding all my books one by one. It's going in reverse chronological order. I'm so I'm currently reading "The Power of Now," so this is the first book. All right, and when you click in here, you can see the book covers, both the icon and the background. This is just by default, you can change that. The short, kind of prettified version of the book title. The full title is down here. You've got the author, got a URL to go back to the original Amazon page. If this were Instapaper, this would be a link, or Pocket, this would be a link to the article itself.
Next, we've got the date, which is when I last highlighted this book. So, I guess I was reading it last night. Last sync, this is when Readwise last updated it. This is helpful just for giving me peace of mind that you've got the most recent data. The next is the category. This is a book, as opposed to an article or a tweet. And then there's the total number of highlights. You know, I've just started the book, I'm only one or two chapters in, so I don't have very many highlights.
Okay, then in the body of the page, with the Notion, you've got all your exports here, or all being highlights here. At the top, you can see that I've got a table of introduction, or table of contents. This is because I use the inline heading tags within Readwise. If you don't know what that is, go to our blog, and you can find the option there. And then here you can see the introduction. Got the passage. If you have any tags, you can see I took an inline tag here, those will be exported underneath. And the same with the note. And then here's the location. This is the inline location that I mentioned.
This setting, you can click this, and if you've got the Kindle app installed on your computer, this will launch directly to that highlight within the Kindle app. This only works if you have the app installed. If you don't have the app installed, you'll just come to your browser, and it will do nothing. Um, now you can see that Kindle is launching. And if you try that on mobile, it also will not work because deep linking into Kindle only works on desktop for some reason. The apps do not allow.
All right, so that's what each of these pages looks like. Like I mentioned before, as I continue to read this book, what was pretty cool is underneath here, new highlights will be updated. It will just be appended to the bottom of the note, and there'll be a date here telling me when I took those highlights. You can come up here and you can re-edit the notes. You can change the formatting. You can add highlighting. You can write your own notes, and that will not be overwritten because the highlights will be appended at the bottom.
At the moment, if you go into Readwise and you were to edit the text of this highlight, which you can do now through the "Edit Highlight" feature, where if you were to add a new note or tag, just due to certain technical limitations, we can't come back to this note and update this highlight or add those tags. We might go to do that in the future, but at the moment, just be aware all notes and tags and highlight edits that you have before you start the integration will be exported. Any subsequent ones you make in Readwise will not be updated.
So, this is the book screen. You know, obviously, Notion is known for its kind of like beauty and aesthetics. There's also other pages. This is in gallery view because we've got all the nice book covers. There's also list view for articles. You can see a bunch of articles I've read on Instapaper here. And then list view for tweets. And tweets, we'll take the picture or the avatar of the Twitter account and then put it here. And again, just like books, on every time you take a or save a new tweet, these will be updated here.
I'm going to see there's a little section up here just explaining everything that I'm explaining in this video. If you feel like you got it, feel free to delete this, and then you'll be good.
Then the final question that a lot of people ask is, you know, they might already have a resources section in their Notion or have a place that they want this library to go. Can you move this? And the answer is yes. You can move this anywhere in your Notion workspace. It's like the same workspace, and the Readwise integration will still be able to find it and update it and work without a problem. You can also rename it if you want. You can also move individual pages from within the database, and everything should continue to work on that end.
There are some experimental aspects to this integration, so there are some situations in which it might break down. If you do want to reset everything and start over, but what's key is that you delete it, and then not just delete it, but also make sure you go in and you delete it from the trash as well, and permanently delete it.
So, that was the Readwise to Notion integration. For everyone out there that uses Roam, I will be adding another one. If you use Evernote, we already have an Evernote integration, and we'll probably be adding a few more of these over time. So, please feel free to respond to this with any comments or email I said, hello@readwise.io, have any questions, and I hope you enjoy it.