Need a Read Later App

Which ‘Read Later’ app works best with Bear? I want to pull my Kindle highlights and notes and any article text I save.

Currently, I just pull off the Kindle website and paste it in. For articles, I use the clipper and manually highlight what I want.

I’m just looking for something possibly faster.

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I highly recommend https://omnivore.app/
Open Source, nice integrations and features — love it. Might work for you.

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Using Readwise for all my read later needs. Has a healthy ecosystem of webclipper, reading app, kindle highlights and spaced repetition of your stuff in exactly the mixture you desire. You can collect everything: physical books, Tweets threads, RSS feeds, epubs, PDFs. You name it.
I also like to pay for excellent apps. Good investment of money for knowledge.

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How did you integrate Readwise with Bear? I was looking for a way to do it. There is no option in Readwise to export, and I’ve read some attempts to do that with shortcuts. Some people do it manually, exporting markdown and then importing, but I use Kindle and Reader daily, so that is not so efficient.

I also use Reader by Readwise as a read-later app.

You can also use Instapaper, it works great.

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@rebabaskett If you only need to access to the read later app on Apple devices, then I recommend an app called GoodLinks. It is an excellent read later app. Plus there is no recurring subscription cost required for simple “read later.” Highly rated @ 4.8 stars. Here is the app store link.

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Good question, @Perpetuum. As of now, I am manually importing relevant entries as needed. My experience with the official Readwise plugins in LogSeq and Obsidian tells me that it is simply dead weight in my db. YMMV.
I’d be curious for any strategies to have a daily mention of what I highlighted when.

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To clarify, are you looking for a “read later” app that is Bear-compatible, or are you asking how to get Kindle highlights into Bear?

If the former, none of the “read later” providers I looked at (Matter, Instapaper, Omnivore) have native support for pushing highlights/notes into Bear (like a plugin or built-in feature). All three have APIs for extracting content, if you’re comfortable with building something to parse API responses. Otherwise, I’d submit a feature request.

If the latter, I have no idea (Amazon doesn’t provide an API for these, AFAIK).

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Right now I copy and paste from the kindle website. It works was just hoping for a faster way if it is out there.

I will look into the ones you suggested.

Thanks

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Hi @Perpetuum - I had the same query and contacted both Bear and Readwise and both said they didn’t have plans to add it :frowning:

But there is a Shortcut that mostly works (I get formatting oddities sometimes - just to do with the icons it adds)

but yes, there’s a shortcut, it might be a solution for you:

Details in a reddit thread I contributed to at the time:
https://www.reddit.com/r/readwise/comments/16z9xla/export_to_bear/

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Thank you, @TimO! I think I will use it, since I would really like to have connection between the two.

There exists a Apple Shortcut for sending Readwise to Bear:

Robert Breen mentions using an Apple Shortcut developed by Ben Bailey to integrate Readwise and Bear 2.

I use Bear itself as a Read Later app. I save all my articles into Bear and have a Things Reminder - with link to the # holding all the saved articles that I can go through in the evening.

I’m all about lessening the scope of the apps I use - so if I can use Bear for as many tasks as possible then I find a way.

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Can I ask for input on how you best save articles from browser/apps?
Only links, full web pages or do you mark the text you want to save?
(I struggle with a lot of incomplete pages when I try to save full web content)

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I am generally saving articles to read later so I save the webpage with the link.

I find Bear a better, cleaner way of reading as it saves the text, and an image, without all the adverts and such.

I haven’t experienced the issue you report of content being missing.

Actually, it would be very obvious for me to use Bear as a read-later app: I love the typography and can organize the saved texts/articles from the web very well using the nested tags. Then there’s the fact that you’ll be able to mark parts of text with different colors in the future. Bear would actually be the best app. (To make the experience absolute perfect bear would have to realise the requested “read only”-feature for notes and to offer in the web preferences to choose if the clippings would be read-only by default)

@rexikan
So what’s wrong then with it? I’m not satisfied with the quality of the clippings. If the devs like i can post some screenshots that show some typical flaws or failures of bear at web clipping. As far as I have read bear uses the post light reader engine. Their own chrome or firefox extensions results however are better at first sight.

I also use Good Links. But there is a brand-new app that offers highlighting and annotating text. The app is in a very early stage and far from finish. It’s called MarkMark, is still free of charge and is available in the App Store

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Thx! I’ll check it out.

Hey maybe this could help you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJ4JWAv8xao&list=PLbzOIxIlBCE4rEGcGxv-mcMzaMYy2Mx8k&index=6
(Readwise and Bear: A Shortcut to Integrate Two INCREDIBLE Apps!)

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This is really helpful, thank you!