readwiseio / obsidian-readwise

Official Readwise plugin for Obsidian

Readwise Official 📚

This official plugin maintained by the Readwise team enables you to easily and automatically export all your digital highlights to Obsidian from a variety of sources such as Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play Books, Instapaper, Pocket, Medium, Twitter, PDFs, and more.

Note: This plugin requires a subscription with Readwise — a paid service that makes it easy to aggregate and review all your reading data into one place.

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Features

• Continuous, automatic syncing — Take a highlight while reading in bed and wake up to the highlight in your Obsidian vault
• Powerful, flexible templating — Customize the format of the export to your bespoke preferences using the Jinja2 templating language
• Enriched metadata — Upgrade your highlight exports with extra data including the cover image, original URL, author name, chapter headings, tags (taken while you read), and more
• Premium support — As a paid product, receive prompt replies to your questions and continuous upgrades to the plugin per your feedback

Usage

• Install the Readwise Official plugin within Obsidian
• Enable the plugin
• Connect the plugin to your Readwise account
• Customize the export settings, if desired
• Initiate the first sync
• Thereafter, the plugin can be configured to sync automatically or manually

Support

• Please see our Documentation or email us at [email protected] 🙂

Community Resources

• Readwise Obsidian Plugin - Is It Any Good? video by Santi Younger
• First Look at the Official Readwise Obsidian Plugin article by Ben Newton
• Getting Started with the Readwise Official Plugin video by Effective Remote Work
• Building a Second Brain with Readwise + Obsidian video by Systematic Mastery
• Making Unexpected Connections with Readwise and Obsidian video by Curtis McHale
• How I View My Latest Readwise Highlights in My Obsidian Daily Note article by Ben Newton
• Color Code Your Readwise Highlights in Obsidian with Chetachi's CSS snippets
• How to Import Your Shortform Highlights Into Obsidian Using Readwise article by Nicole van der Hoeven

obsidian-readwise's Issues

Sync sometimes re-syncs all highlights

Roughly once a week ALL of my notes (tweets etc) get re-synced as opposed to just new ones, and I have to sift through them to remove the old ones and find the new ones.

I've not been able to determine what causes this type of sync and the Resync deleted files option is turned off in the settings.

Happy to help with any testing.

Multiple paragraphs in a single highlight do not have empty lines between them

I'm currently evaluating Readwise. I have set up sync from Readwise to Obsidian. It works well, but when I highlight multiple paragraphs in a single highlight in Reader, the highlight as it appears in Obsidian does not have an empty line between the paragraphs. Paragraphs must have an empty line between them in order to appear as paragraphs, and not just a line break in a single paragraph.

Feature Request: Selectively Import into Obsidian by Tag

When Readwise is used for research, it can be useful to separate imports by tag. This would fit well with how Obsidian is separated by vault. If I'm a banker whose hobby is bodybuilding, I'd like to be able to separate the things I read. One tag ("finance") may contain information that I'm using to improve in my career, and the other tag ("health") may be used for my hobby. Having both health and finance muddled into the same "articles" or "books" folder with Readwise-Obsidian sync would be cumbersome.

Plugin does not work on mobile yet

Would be great if this coulld work on mobile devices(like iPad) too.

Existing not official plugins work on iPad, so there should not be any technical obstacles.

Obsidian Sync wipes Readwise Highlights from vault.

Readwise highlights sync successfully to my Obsidian vault. However, whenever Obsidian syncs, highlights are indexed out and deleted. If Obsidian Sync is paused, there is no issue. For some reason, only one note remains, this one: https://readwise.io/reader/document_raw_content/116666283. This is incredibly frustrating; the highlights are not permanently deleted, but they are unusable in my vault.

Using Readwise version 2.0.1 and Obsidian 1.5.1

not syncing correctly from readwise to obsidian

Hi,

when I syn from my readwise account to Obsidian, all of my documents land in the Readwise\Articles folder (no other folders are created as per the Export preferences).

When I check the synced articles Metadata, they show #articles even though the metadata in readwise clearly says e.g. #tweet.

I am using Obsidian v1.1.9 if that helps.

The '@' should be not part of the author variable in file names

My export looks something like this:

The import fails because the '@' character is not allowed for naming files. This results in this error message:

It would be really helpful if the '@' character would just be removed.

Sync highllights from Supplemental Books too

Would be great to add support for exporting highlights from supplemental books too (just like Readwise Mirror plugin)

Bullet list exported with actual bullet characters

In the sync from Reader to Obsidian, I have experienced bullet points being exported not using - but using an actual bullet character •. This is of course not valid Markdown, and the result is that it's not properly formatted (indented) as a list.

I have also experienced bullet points appearing properly with -, so I'm not sure what triggers this.

Automatically update metadata

Hello!

When I update metadata in readwise it does not sync to obsidian.

I understand that notes are not synced after first import. And only new highlights are adding. But for metadata I believe that it should always be synced

Thank you!

Resync Deleted files not working

I recently reorganised my vault, and reset the readwise sync in my vault i.e. deleted all the markdown files from readwise.

now when i try to resync the readwise highlights it only syncs the new files, old files are not getting synced.

i have the 'Resync deleted files' enabled, but only new highlights are getting synced.

Feature Request: Timestamps on YouTube Video Highlights

[FR] overwrite updated highlights

Sometimes I add tags, edit highlights, edit doc metadata, edit template, etc on readwise and it does not update on obsidian so I regularly have to delete all my obsidian highlights and resync which takes a while (>1200 highlights)

Desired usage:

checkbox in settings "overwrite on update" or something like that, just overwrite old highlights

Thanks ❤️

The extension doesn't always sync

I highlighted a YouTube video, archived it, then tried to sync it.
Then I got the message that "readwise data is already up to date", even though it isn't.
In fact, any article or video is not exporting right now.

SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: v1.5.3
Installer version: v1.4.16
Operating system: Windows 10 Home 10.0.23612
Login status: logged in
Catalyst license: none
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: dark
Community theme: Minimal v7.4.7
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 52
Plugins enabled: 34
1: Admonition v10.1.1
2: Dataview v0.5.64
3: Google Photos v1.6.5
4: Hider v1.3.1
5: Image Toolkit v1.4.1
6: LanguageTool Integration v0.3.6
7: Linter v1.22.0
8: Minimal Theme Settings v7.3.1
9: Note Refactor v1.8.2
10: Obsidian_to_Anki v3.5.0
11: Paste URL into selection v1.7.0
12: Quick Switcher++ v3.3.9
13: Templater v2.1.0
14: Text Extractor v0.4.10
15: Todoist Plugin v1.11.1
16: Pandoc Plugin v0.4.1
17: Auto Link Title v1.5.0
18: Obsidian Enhancing Export v1.9.6
19: Advanced Slides v1.20.0
20: Hover Editor v0.11.15
21: Plugin Update Tracker v1.5.2
22: Citations v0.4.5
23: Editor Syntax Highlight v0.1.3
24: ExcaliBrain v0.2.11
25: Excalidraw v2.0.17
26: Homepage v3.6.0
27: Pandoc Reference List v2.0.25
28: QuickAdd v1.6.1
29: Readwise Official v2.0.1
30: Zotero Integration v3.1.7
31: Tag Wrangler v0.6.1
32: Tab Switcher v1.4.0
33: Home tab v1.1.2
34: Ghost Fade Focus v3.0.0

Moving a file, deleting it, then syncing again, recreates the file in the original location but leaves two entries for the same book id in data.json

Trying to resolve sync bugs, I noticed the following behavior that seems to cause issues.

1. start with a fresh sync
2. move a file from original import location to new location. data.json correctly gets updated.
3. delete file. data.json still has a reference to the new location even though the file is gone. (as far as I can tell this is what the plugin uses to determine a file was deleted)
4. trigger sync. file gets recreated in original import location. data.json now contains two lines for that file, one in the old location, one in the new location, both with the same book id.

Bug: Latest Sync happened on different device

I'm running the latest version of the plugin & obsidian. I had problems where my Sync would freeze, so I uninstalled and reinstalled the plugin. Went to the website again to generate the token, and when I proceed to sync, I get this message:

"Latest sync happened on different device".

This is all I get on the console.

started sync
(unknown) Readwise Official plugin: setting interval to  0 milliseconds
(unknown) Readwise Official plugin: didn't get token data, retrying (attempt 1)
(unknown) Readwise Official plugin: setting interval to  43200000 milliseconds
2(unknown) started sync

My account is connected with an Amazon account, which the e-mail is [email protected]

Single note/file per quote

For PKM workflows that prefer atomic style notes, it would be preferable to have one note or file for each quote. Then users can assemble these atomic notes in various ways. Has there been any discussion around this idea? I can imagine a setting in the plugin where someone could elect to use a single file/note per quote instead of the current default where quotes live in bulleted lists in a note that represents the entire book/article.

If there is a way to do this that I have missed, please let me know!

Bug at resync

I installed the plugin, I synced a first time. Then
-I highlight a new line in a kindle book
-I sync in Readwise (Kindle>Readwise)
-back in obsidian, I launch the readwise sync command and the plugin produces an endless sequesnce of "Building export.." popups.
Only way to stop this: deactivate, uninstall and restart obsidian
Then I reinstalled and reactivated. Then I started a sync .. and again same endless "building exports.."
I did this again and I also deleted the "Readwise" folder (and all its content)

ScreenFlow.mp4

Feature Request: Separate Vocabulary Words from Highlights

The Obsidian-Readwise configuration only allows configuration of individual highlights. Thus, Jinja2 cannot be used to filter highlights with length 1 (highlighted vocabulary words).

If you have a list of vocabulary words, the actual highlights will be scattered between them, and there is no way to create separate sections for them.

Feature Request: option to disable sync/info notifications

Example of sync notifications on iOS:

These notifications, while sometimes helpful, are often unnecessary unless something went wrong (failed sync, etc.). On iOS, they cover both the top menu bar and the top content for the given page every time the app is opened. It would be great to have an option to disable non-error notifications to reduce the visual clutter when opening Obsidian.

Thanks for the great work on this plugin!

{{date}} always defaults to today

First of all, thanks so much for this integration - you guys rock! I'm using it to sync all my article highlights, and review my document notes weekly (spaced repetition).

Reading through https://readwise.io/export/obsidian/preferences, I'm trying to understand what the {{date}} variable is meant to contain. It appears to always default to today's date. Which kinda works if you sync daily (highlight created date == current date). But when I'm retroactively importing my existing highlights for the first time, it messes up my workflow. Should this variable be defaulting to the date when the Readwise document was created?

Also, it would be amazing if you added {{last_updated_date}}, which would be the newest {{highlight_date}}. Happy to create a separate issue if you don't want to mix bug report and feature request here.

Feature Request: Separate Category for Videos

When using Readwise to save YouTube videos, the video are saved under "articles." I believe these should be categorized separately.

Feature Request: Make all metadata in Reader available to Obsidian Export

The existing Obsidian export is pretty cool and I like the flexibility of the template customization. What would be even better is if the other metadata that is in Readwise is exposed to Obsidian templates. I want to generate citations for articles, for example, but I can't because publish date and saved date.

The summary would be really useful to have exported for searching, etc.
Progress would be nice if you wanted to keep track of media consumption progress.

Feature Request: Add {{ domain }} metadata attribute to documents

user story.

As an Obsidian user I want to enter the domain of a URL as part of my document metadata so that I may explore the relationships between my notes and which sites I am most often using as reference or source material.

example.

Given the following Jinja template:

### metadata.
{% if url -%}
- Site: [[ {{domain}} ]]
- URL: {{url}}
{% endif -%}

And the following document input:

{
  "title": "How a worm gave the south a bad name",
  "url": "https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/"
}

I want the following output:

### metadata.
- URL: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/how-a-worm-gave-the-south-a-bad-name/
- domain: [[pbs.org]]

supplemental information.

• Example Regex

Variable for the page number?

When importing a PDF-document with annotations, the Highlight variable {{highlight_location}} renders into something like ´Page 5´. To create a link like [[document.pdf#page=5]], there is a need for a variable only returning the page number itself, like {{highlight_locaton_page}}

Or, make {{highlight_location_url}} work for PDF documents, generating [[document.pdf#page=5]]

Bug Report: YouTube Highlight Export Combines Words

When importing a YouTube video, then highlighting paragraphs in the transcript, the resulting export combines words together.

So it will look like this:

Readwise isa greatplugin for notes especially withthe Obsidianexport functionality.

"illegal operation on directory, read" error on sync if base folder is "/"

When I set my base folder to "/", I get the error message Readwise: error while writing Readwise Syncs.md: Error: EISDIR: illegal operation on a directory, read. It looks like the plugin is creating an empty directory called Readwise Syncs.md in the root folder instead of a file. The highlights do synch, so it's really just the synch log that's failing.

Please add a link to documentation on the template engine at https://readwise.io/export/obsidian/preferences

I am assuming it's jinja2 but I'm not 100% certain, and it would be helpful to add a link on the page.

[FR] Add Reader Support

I'm specifically looking to be able to sync the AI summaries of my articles, my highlights from the article, and a copy of the article itself.

Is this support on the roadmap? Do you want any help implementing it? I see your API documentation and it looks like I could add it to the extension.

Page metadata variables not available when formatting individual highlights

When formatting individual highlights, the page metadata variables can't be used, they just render as blanks.
I've tried to create a link directly to the page in the pdf-document the highlight origins from, but {{title}} just remains empty when used in the Highlight section of Custom Formatting.

FEATURE REQUEST: Add option to create new files for every highlight

Please add an option for creating new notes/files PER highlight. Having all highlights in one giant file is pointless and defeats the purpose of Obsidian.

Feature request: extract bold/highlights line from Obsidian page and upload to Readwise

Will you considering one more import source. For some people Obsidian is not only a note taking app but also a reading app, like reading pdf or website by using plugins. Extracting bold or highlight lines and uploading to Readwise is a good feature for these people. Then people can review all their highlights in Readwise even the highlights in Obsidian.

[FR] Enable scripting in frontmatter customization

I would like to have different frontmatter metadata depending on the source type (book, article, podcast, etc.). The other customization options support scripting (e.g., {if category=="book"}), would like the same capability extended to frontmatter customization.

I could probably accomplish it using inline fields but then it will be inconsistent with my existing templates.

Download Images?

Hey! Would it be possible for the plugin to download the cover images instead of linking them to a CDN? One of the of core values of Obsidian is being able to keep your notes for life (quote: "Notes for your grandchildren"). It would be great if you could enable this as an option so that my Obsidian notes don't need to rely on external sources that won't be around forever.

Bug: Last Synced date automatically add 1 day when sync on obsidian

Hi,

I just noticed when I let Readwise plugin sync at evening, the last synced date will automatically add 1 day. I checked my notion, system time, and Readwise library, all of them are showing correct date instead of obsidian.

Is there any way to fix obsidian's dates?

Thanks!

Duplicate content when using nested custom folder

When setting the base folder as a nested folder (e.g. "Literature notes\Readwise"), each export appends the full Readwise highlight to the bottom of the existing note, i.e. not only changes / additions. When setting the base folder to a non-nested folder (e.g. "Test"), then the sync works fine.

Feature request: optional notifications when Obsidian opens

Currently I am using Android version of Obsidian and I have enabled "automatically sync when Obsidian opens" setting in the Readwise extension.
However I am receiving notification at the top bar about sync process like "syncing" or "already up to date" way too many times in a day. I would like to disable these alerts (not the sync process though).
It would be great if an option to do so exist and showing the alerts can be enabled by default

Allow customisation of the filename

I'd like to be able to customise the filename (and therefore title) of the note that is generated by Readwise.

A reason for this is that I have general book notes (literature notes) that summarise books, but I'd like to be able to link through to the highlights that Readwise has captured (either link or block-ref). Having two notes with the same title in the Obsidian vault can be confusing. I'd like to title it "Highlights from How to Take Smart Notes" rather than "How to take Smart Notes".

🙏

Nothing Happens When I Click Connect in Settings

Obsidian Version: 0.15.9
Readwise Plugin version - Latest

2022-08-21_10-07-16.mp4

It works on Mobile but it doesn't work on recent version.

Thanks.

Add support for highlight ids

Would be great if the official Readwise plugin would support block-level link references (using the Highlight ID) just like https://github.com/jsonMartin/readwise-mirror#features plugin

I did not found highlight id in the doc https://help.readwise.io/article/126-how-can-i-customize-the-readwise-to-obsidian-export#highlight

Sync error

Starting from today, I am having the following errors when trying to sync notes to Obsidian. I have Obsidian version 0.15.9 and Readwise plugin version 2.0.1 installed.

started sync
index.html:1 Access to fetch at 'https://readwise.io/api/obsidian/init?parentPageDeleted=false' from origin 'app://obsidian.md' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.
readwise.io/api/obsidian/init?parentPageDeleted=false:1          Failed to load resource: net::ERR_FAILED
plugin:readwise-official:7911 Readwise Official plugin: fetch failed in requestArchive:  TypeError: Failed to fetch
    at ReadwisePlugin.eval (plugin:readwise-official:7906:34)
    at Generator.next (<anonymous>)
    at fulfilled (plugin:readwise-official:28:58)
plugin:readwise-official:7932 Readwise Official plugin: bad response in requestArchive:  undefined
app.js:1 Uncaught (in promise) DOMException: Transaction timed out due to inactivity.

Slice for custom title dont work

This custom template settings

will produce this

also in the obsidian folder

Feature Request: Add folder picker to plugin settings

Hey there!

Love this plugin. Very helpful.

It would be great if you could add a folder picker to the plugin options so that we're not forced to use a top-level folder in Obsidian.

Thanks! 🙌

Plugin creates a new, empty folder for each note when base folder is set to "/"

I have my base folder set to / so that my notes will just go right into my default workspace. This function works, but it also creates an empty folder with that same name.

Is there a different value I should be setting my base folder for readwise notes, or is this a bug?

Highlights from Reader not being exported

As per title. Using the official plugin, none of the highlights I have from read.readwise.io are being imported into Obsidian.

The community plugin "Readwise Mirror" does bring them in.

Readwise sync new tags & notes

It seems that there is no solution currently in place to sync new tags and notes, encouraged during Daily Review, to highlights in Obsidian. The only way to reliably get them is to delete everything and sync again from scratch — it is far too tedious to update individual highlights in Readwise and Obsidian. This doesn't seem like a sensible workflow or one that will scale well.

The ultimate solution would be to update changed data in place... At the very least, it would be good to add another "Updated highlights" section appended to a md file. Then my data and effort during a Daily Review aren't lost in the cracks.

YAML and other meta data - Is this mic on?

• I'm on the fence with the Readwise Reader. Much has changed in both Readwise Reader and Obsidian in the last two years.

• I cannot add and status Obsidian yaml fields to readwise notes; they are deleted on the next refresh.

• And if I add a tag (doc or highlight) in Reader, it does not trigger an update.

• Given the standardization of yaml (properties) in Obsidian, are you folks going to address this area of this interface?

• I really DO NOT want to maintain metadata in two places.

• That said, I imagine you folks are up to your ears in keeping up with the flood of new folks into this space and fully realize not too many folks use this integration past the "out of the box" template.

• My quandary - " I really like Reader! ".

The CJK file name is unreadable

The official plugin use normalizePath to generate file name (at here), which will romanize the CJK file names and basically make them become noise instead of information.

Here is the screenshot showing the difference of synced file names from the official plugin and the community one.

So in the community plugin, it simply sanitize the name using some regular expressions, but not nomalize it.

Feature request: Single file, latest on top.

The format that would be most useful for my PKM workflow is to have a single file for all of my Kindle highlights across all books, with my latest highlights always on top.

The use case is opening this file every morning and seeing my highlights ("literature note") from last night, and then creating atomic notes in my "slipbox" (per How to Take Smart Notes).

Is there a way to do this?

Import headings from websites

I often have a lot of highlights from long articles on the web. Readwise (at least Reader) already has a wonderful outline, which I'd like mirrored in Obsidian.

In concrete terms, I would like the import to include the headings from the website (but only those that have highlights), and correctly intersperse these headings between the highlights. I would need the heading levels to be reduced by 1 (based on the levels in Reader), and ignore anything that ends up with h6 or less (since I use that as a brief summary heading for each highlight).