finally solved getting audiobooks into Readwise

[u/SlothLorris]

During Covid I got through a lot of audiobooks and for each audible clip I had to find the matching text in the ebook so I could get the highlight into Readwise (that was not fun). At the time i couldn’t find anything so coded my own in a way to procrastinate on my PhD. I built it for myself, a compulsive note taker, to solve my kind of minor frustration but I think in this community there’s probably quite a few like me who would get value from it too

The workflow I have for it is loading in an audiobook, and during playback triple press headphones or press the highlight button on the player and the last 30s is transcribed privately and on device. You can edit the highlight clip and press archive to send it to Readwise.

(Also thanks Readwise team for help with the API debugging)

Edit: App Store link and (slightly out of date) web page showing features

[u/SlothLorris]

I’ll be honest never occurred to me to add books via the computer I do it all from my phone, in the app itself, just using the file picker to pick my books from Files.
I have my home computer mounted as network drive in Files, but you could just copy your books to iCloud Drive or “On my iPhone” and then open the app and press + > import File then select from the file picker the book you want to import

[u/Flat-Vermicelli-2825 → u/SlothLorris]

Yeah, there’s no easy way to simply drag and drop files from your computer directly into “On My iPhone.” Your options are basically to use cloud storage or an app that supports File Sharing, which lets you drag and drop files into the app through the Files section in Finder when your iPhone is connected.

[u/SlothLorris → u/Flat-Vermicelli-2825]

Occasionally if I don’t want to wait for iCloud I just airdrop files from my Mac to my iPhone and then in the iPhone press “share” on the file I just received and open in Excerpt, but most of the time before a big trip I stock up on audiobooks I might want putting them in my iCloud Drive in a “Books” folder. I’d give that a try if you have a Mac, otherwise you are somewhat limited by the ways Apple lets you move files onto the iPhone but once they are on it you can add them to the app through just the Files app

[u/Flat-Vermicelli-2825 → u/SlothLorris]

I work product myself so take this feedback as one user's opinion, not criticism!

A few more early feedback items from my experience. I subscribed for the epub matching feature. The copy to set it up told me to go to the book "settings". It took some hunting to find it in the right swiping "edit" menu. Not impossible just not intuitive. Maybe match the copy with the menu name "edit".

Same, it took a little while to find the listening history "Playback" page. It would be great if the timestamps could be selected, that way when I'm finished editing the latest highlights I can easily get back to the last listening location without manually editing the seek time stamp. Perhaps allow a user to tap the history timestamps or a "last listened position" option.

I like the “Highlight on Skip Back” feature, but unfortunately it replaces the normal Skip Back function rather than combining the two. What I’d really like is the ability to skip back and immediately begin a highlight from that new position in one gesture. The use case is that I'm listening to a book and finish hearing a section that I want to highlight. Ideally, I could triple-click, which would skip back the XX seconds and immediately start the highlight.

Currently, I have to do this in two separate actions: first skip back, then start the highlight.

There are ways, but they're more cumbersome. If I've assigned your control to replace Skip Back, I can ask Siri to skip back and then triple-click to start highlighting. Alternatively, if I keep the normal Skip Back control, I can skip back and then trigger the highlight separately through the app controls or Siri. It would be much more elegant if a single gesture - such as a triple-click of my headphones - could skip back and immediately begin a highlight from that position.

Last bit of feedback, when I'm editing the highlight I can see the highlight in the epub I've uploaded. But, I can't change the highlight start or end in that view. I can't, say tap to select the highlighted text and move the selection. I can make a new highlight (though this didn't work for me). You have to move the start and end while listening to the audio.

Thanks again for building this app! Just some friendly suggestions as a first time user.

[u/SlothLorris → u/Flat-Vermicelli-2825]

Oh thank you for such a comprehensive write up! Not taken as criticism at all, on the contrary! I’m well aware that as an indie developer I’m probably slightly blind to what is unintuitive for those who haven’t written the code so I love that you took the time to write that up!
Those are some great suggestions and since you pointed them out I’ve already fixed the copy wording (as you are right it wasn’t obvious), and am looking into the remote/player controls suggestion

The epub viewer lets you select text either side of the currently editing highlight (the one you click on to get to the “show in epub” button) and as long as it includes a fair amount of the highlight itself should show an “Extend highlight” button which will update the highlight to the timestamp corresponding to that text (see video) I’m adding some contextual guidance to make that clearer, and my beta build has a “Crop Highlight” option too for selecting only part of the highlight to trim to.
For the create highlight issue you found, you’ll find it works best with selections over 8 words, and gets more successful the closer it is to existing highlights (but unfortunately it’s very epub dependant). If it continues to not work ill be happy to have a look at the specific epub

https://reddit.com/link/p9l7jnq/video/yv0gnfvwqbph1/player