Four colors of ink

Finishing the Taoism book took longer than the reading required, and the reason is the system: on his Kobo he highlights heavily ▸ 3:31, and the four available colors are not decoration, they’re a relevance taxonomy applied at capture time ▸ 3:39:

The taxonomy’s genius is the two axes it separates: impact and compression. A yellow is a seed; a red is an idea that needs paragraphs; a green is homework disguised as a highlight. Sorting happens in the half-second of choosing a color, so the future reader (himself) inherits a pre-filtered corpus.

Downstream, the pipeline is already half-built. When he migrated from Kindle, a small Python script extracted every highlight and published them to his GitHub, his brother’s books included, offered to his sister as a family quote library ▸ 6:02. The Kobo plan repeats the move with the color metadata intact: its highlights live in a JSON with page ranges and colors, so a simple program can filter by color, date, book, and publish them somewhere permanent ▸ 4:23. The system this replaces was pure friction: stop reading, grab the phone, type the quote, note the book ▸ 4:56, whose one virtue, quotes always at hand, the new pipeline must preserve.

clasificar en el momento de leer; extraer con un script; publicar →

Capture with taxonomy, extract with scripts, publish in the open: it is, detail for detail, the architecture of the archive you are reading right now, discovered independently by its own subject…