[dmotz]

Bit of a shameless plug but I've been thinking about this for a while and I recently built a free/open-source tool called Emdash [1] to tackle the problem. I’m a heavy ebook highlighter, but I found if I didn’t have a compelling way to review those highlights they fell out of my understanding.

My tool uses on-device semantic embedding which allows you to peruse your collection and see related passages from other books which I find really helps in comprehension when you view a related idea in the words of another author. You can also search for semantic concepts directly to see nearby ideas from various authors, which is nice for when you’re in a mood for exploring a particular space via raw concepts.

The demo mode also previews a passage rephrasing feature, which can give you a simplified or metaphorical explanation, which I’ve found really valuable in grokking dense excerpts. This part is powered by LLMs (off-device) but will be opt-in later. I’m trying to gauge interest for it, so there’s a form to sign up for a waitlist if you’d like.

Would love to hear if anyone else uses this tool and what they’d like to see in it. Source code is available too [2].

[1] https://emdash.ai

[2] https://github.com/dmotz/emdash

[jnac]

This is a beautiful app - my problem with tools like this is I don't use a Kindle so ingesting highlights is painful, but I'll plan on giving this a shot nevertheless.