Second ReadWhat is the best way to save quotes from books?
15 September 2026
Every method of saving a quote trades effort now against usefulness later, and most people pick one that is cheap now and useless later. Here is what each one actually costs on both sides.
The best method is whichever one you can do without putting the book down, that produces text rather than an image, and that shows the quote back to you later without you asking. Very few methods manage all three.
For a physical book, photographing the page and running text recognition over it is the only approach that is fast at the moment of reading and searchable afterwards. For a Kindle, highlighting is already ideal at save time and the work is all in getting the highlights back out. For anything on a screen, capturing the region directly beats both.
The method to avoid is the one most people use, which is a photograph that stays a photograph. Two thousand images in a camera roll are not searchable, not quotable, and never opened again.
Should you write quotes out by hand?
Writing quotes out by hand genuinely improves how well you remember them, and it is slow enough that it changes what you choose to save, usually for the better. The research on handwriting and retention is reasonably solid.
The cost is that a handwritten commonplace book is not searchable and does not resurface. It is a memory aid at the moment of writing rather than a retrieval system afterwards, and it is worth being clear about which of those you want.
The combination that works is to capture everything quickly and copy out by hand the few that keep coming back. That way the slow method is applied only to the passages that earned it.
How do you save a quote from a physical book?
Photograph the page with your phone, then run text recognition on the photo. On iPhone, open the photo in Photos and tap the text icon in the bottom right to select the words directly. On Android, Google Lens does the same from the Photos app or the camera.
Get the page as flat and as evenly lit as you can, and fill the frame with the paragraph rather than the whole spread. Recognition accuracy depends almost entirely on how many pixels each letter gets, so cropping in beats a high megapixel count.
Add the book and the page number in the same breath, while you have the book open. Reconstructing the source of an orphaned quotation months later takes longer than the original capture did.
Where should you keep saved quotes?
Keep them somewhere that exports to a plain format you can read without the tool, and that puts them in front of you without being opened. Those two properties matter more than any feature in the app.
The export test is about outliving the product. Markdown, JSON, or CSV are all fine; a proprietary database with no export button means your collection lasts exactly as long as somebody else's company does.
The resurfacing test is about whether the collection does anything. A perfectly organised archive you never open is indistinguishable from not having saved anything, which is the quiet failure almost every note-taking system eventually reaches.
Obsidian passes the first test outright, because your notes are Markdown files in a folder you own, and does nothing for the second. Second Read is built for the second, showing one saved quote on every new tab, and exports to Markdown or JSON so it passes the first as well. The pairing is common and sensible: capture and resurface in one, think and write in the other.
Do you need permission to quote from a book?
Saving quotes for your own use needs no permission at all. Copyright restricts copying for distribution, and a private collection of passages you are keeping to reread is not distribution under any reading of it.
Publishing them is different. Short quotations with attribution generally fall under fair use in the United States and fair dealing in the UK, but the safe harbours are narrower than people assume, and reproducing an entire chapter across a series of posts is not saved by quoting it in pieces.
Poetry and song lyrics are the trap. They are short, so even a few lines can be a substantial part of the whole work, and rights holders in music enforce aggressively. Quote those only with permission.