Clive Thompson’s essay on the experience of reading War and Peace on his iPhone is just so, so good:

The phone’s extreme portability allowed me to fit Tolstoy’s book into my life, and thus to get swept up in it. And it was being swept up that, ironically, made the phone’s distractions melt away. Once you’re genuinely hankering to get back to a book, to delve into the folds of its plot and the clockwork machinations of its characters, you stop needing so much mindfulness to screen out digital diversions. The book becomes the diversion itself, the thing your brain is needling you to engage with. Stop checking your email and Twitter! You’ve got a book to read!

He seamlessly blends thoughts on the reading experience with impressions on the book and revelations on the differences between reading physical books vs. ebooks. (Spoiler: it turns out reading books on screens isn’t as bad as some might want us to believe…)

I especially liked this idea he mentions towards the end:

By the time I was done with War and Peace, I had amassed 12,322 words of highlights and marginalia. It was a terrific way to remind myself of the most resonant parts of Tolstoy. Indeed, I so enjoyed revisiting those notes that I wanted a paper copy of them. Using the Espresso print-on-demand machine at the McNally Jackson bookstore in New York, I had the notes printed up as a small 84-page paperback. It sits on my shelf, a little compilation of my reading and thinking — or, as I titled it, War in Pieces.

This is something I want to do for the books I read as well, so I took to Twitter to ask Clive how he did it.

In addition to his response (he exported text from Kindle Highlights into InDesign), the folks at Clippings.io chimed in to tell us about their service¹. Clippings lets you import your Kindle highlights and notes, organize them, search them, and best of all: you can export to PDF if you want a nicely-printed version. I signed up immediately and I’m really liking it so far.