Readwise2Roam

Readwise2Roam brings together two of my favorite products:

• Readwise which syncs with Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper and many others to bring your highlights into its database and email you a selection every morning.
• Roam Research which is a note-taking app that allows all notes to be relative to each other.

As soon as I started using Roam, I wanted to bring my Readwise highlights into it but, with more than 5,000 of them, I wasn't going to do that manually. So I wrote a PHP script to convert Readwise's exported CSV file to Roam's importable MD files.

Instructions

You can either run the script on your own machine by following the instructions below — or simply go to Readwise2Roam.com.

To run the script locally:

• Download/clone readwise2roam.php to a new directory (which will eventually be filled with MD files so you don't want this on your desktop!).

• Go to Readwise's Export Your Data page and upload the file you get to the new directory you created.

• On Mac, go to Terminal and cd to the new directory and type php readwise2roam.php.

• The script should run and fill the directory with MD files, the names of which will correspond to the titles of the books/articles you highlighted in Readwise.

• Go to Roam Research and click the three dots on the top right in Roam, press "Import" and select the books you'd like to import.

Issues

If you do this more than once (without having carefully curated what you're bringing in to Roam), you'll end up with pages containing repeated highlights. It's obviously up to you to curate your list.

Roam's import function doesn't seem to work well in Safari. Try Firefox.

This code won't deal with two books with the same name, even if by different authors.