Using Readernaut for taking notes on books
Over the past couple of months I’ve been working on reviving the PyATL book club. We received our first batch of books from Addison-Wesley/Pearson Education in time to distribute them at our meeting last month. I’ll be posting my review soon, but before I do that I wanted to share my experiences with Nathan Borror’s excellent http://readernaut.com/.
The site is easy to use. Once you have an account, just use the search field to find a book, either already in the Readernaut catalog or at Amazon. Add it to your shelf, then record your progress and notes as you read. In true web 2.0 fashion, you can connect with other readers and follow their progress (indeed, I may be coming late to the party on this one, because after I signed up I found a bunch of other Pythonistas already using the site to post notes and reviews about the books they’re reading).
After a bit of experimentation, I’m hooked. I used the site to take notes about my first book club book, and am finding the results very helpful while preparing the summary for my review. I can record notes, quotes, and remarks as separate types of comments. All include page numbers, so as I build the review I don’t even have to go hunting through the book for references.
Besides posting my own material, I’ve found a couple of interesting-looking titles among the books others are reading. As though I needed help finding more books to read.
If you take your reading seriously, check out http://readernaut.com/ as a convenient way to keep up with your notes.