Hi there! I’ve been trying to replace Readwise with Hookmark as my de-facto solution for Apple Books annotations as, while the former does a stellar job of syncing over annotations, Hookmark would have the additional advantage of creating deep-links to the book where I could go to re-contextualise the annotations.
What I would ideally be able to achieve with this integration is:
Read and highlight passages of a book in Apple Books
Select those highlights and create new Hookmark links to the passages
Accumulate those links (including the passages) in a Logseq page which I can then take notes on
In its current form Readwise can create a page in Logseq and sync any annotations I have on my books (see below) but naturally there’s no links to the original content which Hookmark can provide.
Welcome to the Hookmark Forum , @somada141. And thanks for bringing that up.
We’ve asked the people at at logseq for an API. I don’t have status on that. It’s open source, so perhaps anyone can go in and build a bridge as was done for Obsidian (which led to several options for Using Hook with Obsidian – Hook).
Regarding Apple Books (which I use a lot) : it does not have an API for copying deep links, or even copying text. We have found a way to hook entire books, as I think you noticed. I use Books in conjunction with TextSniper and the Hook to New function command. I paste the text in the new note; the text acts as an implicit index that can then be copied and pasted into Books search if you need to get back to the original context. If TextSniper has AppleScript, we should be able to create a shortcut and/or AppleScript to stream line this.
Hi Luc and thanks for the response, yeah Apple Books seems to cripple the lovely functionality Hookmarks offers which is a darn shame but I wouldn’t hold my breath on them opening it up anytime soon. The implicit index approach you’ve mentioned above is pretty much what I’ve landed on thus far though it’s admittedly rather painful to work with.
I hope y’all work out the Logseq integration cause it feels like the perfect note-taking companion app to Hookmark’s functionality
Regarding Apple Books: I wouldn’t say it is crippled. Copy Link and Hook to Copied Link works. It took us a while to figure out how to do it. It’s just that we can do deep links. But even without deep links I find it super helpful. It’s partly a matter of how one structures one’s notes. I described in Cognitive Productivity with macOS: 7 Principles for Getting Smarter with Knowledge how I do it. Often I will find the table of contents online and paste it into my notes. I often use OmniOutliner for this. It doesn’t take much time, and the effort is worth it. Even massing the table of contents is a good way to kick off comprehension of the book.
Once one has a hierarchical table of content, with the right app, navigating is much faster. And of course batch search (which OmniOutliner and many other apps provide) comes in very handy.
I described a process for PDFs here from a cognitive psy perspective:
