I find https://readwise.io is a valuable tool for retaining ideas from what I read. That tool helps to gather book quotes from ebooks and physical books and then uses spaced repetition to remind you of quotes over time.
Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 books at a time usually mixed between fiction and nonfiction.
Readwise also has an excellent integration with Roam Research that has utterly transformed my whole way of working with books. I can’t emphasize it enough without sounding manic.
Everything I highlight in Kindle now gets automatically imported into my Roam graph. The quotes go into the page for each book (autocreated) under timestamped sections that also show up in my daily notes page. All my highlights from the past were imported in bulk.
It is now trivial and pleasant for me, at any time while I’m thinking and journaling in Roam, to pull in a quote reference from any of my Kindle books, just with a nice inline search box.
I’m getting into writing and researching in a much more serious way and this workflow is a big part of why. I love it so much.
A game-changer for me recently has been that you can read on Kindle on the iPad in split-screen with Notes, highlight something on Kindle and drag it into Notes.
These are great tools but are there any nice iOS apps to quickly take a photo of a physical book page , and with OCR produce a text page that I can highlight, and send highlights to Roam (which I use a lot).
Some books are much better experienced in physical form, e.g I would hate to read Rian Hughes’ XX on a kindle :)
Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 books at a time usually mixed between fiction and nonfiction.