I have the bad habit of starting to read several books and then taking a long time to finish (I just finished a book that I started to read 3 years ago!). I like books both in printed and electronic format. I grab them and start reading. Next thing I know, I’m reading 10 books at the same time.
I decided to organize things so I can finish off the books I’ve started, and put a little more thought into what books I’m going to read next. This is what I do…
Put all books in a single place…
I put all of my digital books in PDF format in a Books notebook in Evernote. This allows to search across all of these books (a feature of Evernote). I also add one note for each print books and audiobooks I have.
Tag them…
I use 4 different tags:
- Backlog: used for books I want to read;
- To Read: used for books I want to start reading as soon as possible;
- Reading: used for books I’ve started to read but haven’t finished yet;
- Read: used for books I’m done reading.
Use “Saved Searches”…
I created one “Saved Search” for each one of those tags. It looks like this on my search menu:
I’ve been focusing on my “Books – 2-Reading” search, as I want to finish off those books (there are 11 in the list right now!).
This is how I create each search:
This is how I save the search:
Write book notes…
For each book I’m reading, I create a separate note named after the book’s title, and tag it with “book notes”. I then type in whatever comments I want, put snapshots of specific pages, URLs, anything else related to the book that I find I may need in the future. These notes also go into my Books notebook.
I know I can annotage things on Kindle books and export my notes, but as I mentioned, I have books in Kindle format, PDF, print, audiobooks, so I decided to follow the flow described in this post for any type of book format.
Signing off now. I have some reading to do!
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