Creating a commonplace book is somewhat like marking your favorite lines in a novel with the Amazon Kindle highlights feature — except your one-stop knowledge repository can also include song lyrics, movie dialogue, poems, recipes, podcast transcripts, and any inspiring bits you find in your reading and listening. The commonplace book is not a new concept: Copying down your favorite lines from other people’s works into your annotated notebook was a standard exercise in Renaissance Europe, and the idea can be traced to the Roman era.
But here, in the modern world of digital connectivity, you don’t have to keep everything in one physical location. With the right app, you can use your smartphone, tablet, or computer to collect and sync new content for your collection — and use the search function later to find specific entries. Here’s how to start making a commonplace digital book — or how to convert that battered notebook of thoughts and quotes you’ve been keeping all along.
Get Inspired
If you’ve never made a commonplace book, first learn how others have used it. Academic libraries and museums are home to many commonplace books; you can see them without leaving the couch. John Milton’s commonplace book is on the British Library site, and the personal notebooks of other writers and thinkers pop up quickly with a web search. The Internet Archive has many scanned commonplace books to browse — including one compiled by the actor Alec Guinness. The Yale University Library has scanned pages of commonplace historical books. The Harvard Library has a few online collections and images of a version of John Locke’s 17th-century guide to making commonplace books, which was initially used and published in French. And the Internet Archive has hundreds of commonplace digitized books for browsing or borrowing, including one from Sir Alec Guinness.
Notes for Your Notes
Collecting your commonplace entries in a word-processing document stored online is one option for sheer simplicity. If you find that approach unwieldy, consider the note-taking app with your phone — Apple’s Notes or Google Keep. Just enter quotations and other text snippets whenever you get the urge. To skip typing or pasting, Google Keep can scan and transcribe text from book pages images, and Apple’s Siri voice assistant or the Google Assistant can create a note and take dictation. The note-taking app on your smartphone, like Google Keep, left, or Apple’s Notes, can be a place to stash favorite quotations and other content for your commonplace digital book. You can also use your notes app through your computer’s web browser, where it’s often easier to cut and paste items and apply text formatting. Your changes will update across all the devices, as long as you’re logged into the same Apple ID or Google Account everywhere.
Use a Dedicated App
Plenty of specialized notebooks and journal apps await you if you’d instead reserve your phone’s notes app for daily life. Some apps include features like keyword tagging to help organize your commonplace book by theme or topic. Most apps offer a basic free version but require a fee for certain features; for example, the Bear app for iOS and Mac devices requires a $15 annual subscription to sync among devices. Detail-oriented people may appreciate Notion, an expansive writing and organizing app with page templates and a clipping tool for saving parts of web pages to a note. Evernote, a longtime player in the commonplace mobile category, has templates, aWeb Clipper function, and an Apple Watch app.
Day One, the popular personal journal app for iOS-based hardware, has its own Apple Watch and desktop versions. Daybook, another journaling app, runs on Android, iOS, and web browsers — and works with Alexa, Bixby, and Google Assistant so you can create entries by voice or have them read aloud. The Bear app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac offers an elegant writing space and synchronization among devices for about $15 a year. But if you require just a no-frills, no-distraction tool for text-based entries into your commonplace electronic book, there’s Simplenote. And it’s free.
Convert a Paper Notebook
What if you’ve been keeping a commonplace physical book for years but would like to digitize the whole thing without retyping it all? One method: Snap a photo of each page and import the image into your notes app, preserving the look of your original hand-scrawled entries. As for Kindle readers who have been marking passages in their e-books for years: You can see all your highlights at https://read.amazon.com/notebook and decide which lines you’d like to add to your commonplace book.
