How I Took Notes on 250+ Books in Roam

This post originally appeared on Superorganizers.

I have notes on over 250 books in my Roam database. 

I’ve been taking book notes for years, and I’ve tried everything from Evernote, to a private wiki, to Notion. And Roam is by far the best tool I’ve found to manage, annotate, and surf through them when I want to resurface my knowledge. 

It’s probably not a huge surprise. In my Superorganizers interview, Dan shared how I'm "living in the matrix" by using Roam for note taking, writing, project management, a personal CRM, recipe management, and more. But maintaining my digital library by storing and interlinking all my notes from books I've read is my favorite thing I use Roam for, partially because of a secret integration I’ll share with you shortly.

For example, when I wanted to work on improving some of the management structure at Growth Machine, I started by surfing through my notes from management books like The Effective Executive:

Or if I want to cook something new for dinner, I could surf through some of the recipes I pulled out of my favorite cooking book: Salt Fat Acid Heat

In this article, I'll go through why Roam is so powerful for building your digital library, and how you can start that digital library by annotating books and adding them to your Roam database.

If you already have notes from hundreds of books, great, you'll have a fantastic foundation to start on. If you've never highlighted a book, that's great too! Today is a fantastic time to start.

Why Roam for Your Digital Library

There are plenty of tools you could use to organize your book notes: Evernote, Notion, a filing cabinet, so what's special about Roam?

Roam describes itself as a tool for "networked" thought, and the ability to network chunks of information together in Roam is what really sets it apart. Instead of your notes simply being documents in a folder, every chunk of text within your notes becomes its own block of information you can endlessly reference and embed throughout other pages in your database.

That's kind of conceptually confusing, so let me give an example:

Let's say I want to start a master document on being a better manager. To start, I'll create a new page called "Being a Better Manager" and make a reference to The Effective Executive. Those double brackets are a page reference, essentially a hyperlink to another document in your Roam database.

To start filling out my Better Manager page, I can open the Effective Executive page in the Sidebar and start looking for good notes to reference: