New IFTTT ebook recipe: collect book highlights in a single note on Evernote

If you are using a book-reading app that offers an option to send a selected text via email, then you’ll have a chance to collect all the highlighted text outside the app.

A benefit of going this route is that no matter which app you use, and on which device, you will always collect the text in a single, editable document in your Evernote account.

I’ve just created a new IFTTT recipe that does that: collects text sent by email, and tagged with a special word, in a single document on Evernote.

You can personalize the recipe with:

• the tag you use when sending an email – by default it’s set to “highlights”,
• the name of the note – the default is “My highlights” – the note with such a title will be created automatically when a first text is being sent,
• the notebook – it’s set to default.

Now, when you find the text you want to collect, select it, and use “share via email” function.

Send the email to trigger@ifttt.com, and add this special word IFTTT needs to properly execute the recipe. In our case it’s #highlights. You can add the tag either to the title or body of the email, it doesn’t matter. It won’t be passed to the Evernote, anyway.

The outcome will be a bulleted list of all texts sent via email from your book-reading application(s).

You can obviously use this recipe to collect not only book highlights but any text snippets, for instance, ideas, or clippings from webpages.

Use the recipe as many times as you want, just choose a different tag for a different destination document in Evernote.

⇢ IFTTT

Check out more posts about IFTTT:

How to automatically archive quotes from ebooks in a single document
– September 20, 2013