Export Book Quotes to Obsidian and Notion

Why personal knowledge vaults need paper book quotes

Obsidian and Notion are where a lot of people already keep articles, newsletters and notes from PDFs. The paper books often stay out of that pile.

If a line never leaves the book, it is not in the notes you write from. Export is the handoff: a file with the passage, the book and, when you saved one, the page.

What each export file contains

The export screen offers five formats: Markdown, plain text, JSON, Notion and Obsidian. There is no CSV file. Notion is a Markdown file you import yourself, not a connection to a Notion account. Obsidian is one Markdown note per book. Nothing is sent off the phone by the export, and cloud sync is off in this release.

Page numbers and margin notes are included when the quote has them and those options are left on. The four switches on the export screen can turn metadata, book grouping, page numbers or margin notes off. With the switches left on, the files differ like this:

• Markdown: one file. Quotes sit under the book title and author. Each passage is a blockquote, then the page number and the marking name, then your margin note. No capture date, and none of the tags you assigned.
• Plain text: the same grouping, as ordinary lines. The line under a quote can include the page, the marking, and the book title and author, then the margin note. No capture date and no tags.
• JSON: a backup. Each book can include its title, author and ISBN. Each quote can include the text, page number, margin note, marking name, extraction confidence, capture date, and the book title and author. Tags are not in the file.
• Notion: one Markdown file. A heading for the book, a table with the author, reading status and quote count, then each passage with its page and marking, and your note. No capture date and no tags.
• Obsidian: one Markdown note for each book that has quotes. The header has the title, author, ISBN if the book has one, the number of quotes, and the date you exported. It also adds two tags of its own, book-quotes and reading. Passages are ordered by page and can include the page, the marking and the margin note. Your own tags, and the date you captured the quote, are not written into this file.

Setting up an Obsidian literature note workflow

Keep what the author wrote separate from what you think about it. The Obsidian export is already one note per book, named from the title. Drop that file into a folder such as Literature Notes.

Each passage is a blockquote. Under it you get the page, when the quote has one, and the marking name, then your margin note. The tags you set in the app are not in the file. Add them in Obsidian if you still want them, and link the passage into the note you are writing with [[Note Name]].

• The page number is included only when the quote has one.
• Add your own tags in the vault. The export does not copy them from the app.
• Link a passage into the note you are actually writing.

Importing quotes into Notion databases

Export the Notion format and import that Markdown file yourself. It is not a CSV, and the app does not create a Notion database for you. If you would rather start from structured data, use the JSON export. The ordinary Markdown export is the other option.

Once the file is in Notion, you can add properties for title, author, page and tags, and filter them however you like. Those properties are yours to set up. They are not columns in the export.

Closing the loop: from physical page to finished writing

The point of the notes is the work you do with them. Read on paper, capture the lines you want to keep, and export them when you are ready to write. A digital commonplace book is one way to decide which lines are worth that trip.

When you write, the passages are in that file, with the book named. You search them there, instead of hunting through the closed paperback.