Never lose a quote from a physical book again
Key points of this use case
- Underlining passages or sticking notes in a physical book still makes it hard to pull out what you need later
- With Ikes, you can use OCR to extract text from a photographed page and save it as an image caption
- Set the book title as the source and tag with the author name or intended use to quickly find the quote later
Are insights from physical books staying in the moment?
Reading a physical book, there are moments when a passage genuinely moves you. A single sentence deepens your understanding, connects to a work challenge, or expands the way you think.
Unfortunately, the words and inspiration gained from reading don't stay in your head forever.
Sticking a note makes it hard to search later. A photo alone leaves the context fragmented. Copying text into a note app takes too much effort. As a result, the moment you close the book, much of what you learned goes back on the shelf with it.
Carry the value of physical reading in your iPhone
No matter how good a book is, sometimes the few lines that struck you personally are worth more than the entire contents. Yet with a physical book, you can't digitally search those lines or easily revisit them in daily life. The moment the book goes back on the shelf, access drops to nearly zero.
This is the hidden cost of reading on paper.
Extract the personal essence of what you read and take it with you. Ikes, designed for managing and exploring ideas, makes that possible.
Just place Ikes next to your book, and reading changes
Ikes is designed to pair well with physical reading. Set your device next to the book and, when a page catches your attention, simply photograph it. That alone saves it as an idea.
When you take the photo, OCR automatically extracts the text on the page, enabling text search later. The extracted text also works with Ikes' Intelligent features, letting you find connections to past notes and ideas or search across keywords.
Equally important is adding your own words as a caption. The insight you felt in the moment, a question, an idea that came to mind. Writing it down keeps your thinking fresh when you revisit the note later. It also feeds into rediscovery through Intelligent Search and Discovery.
Reading becomes a way to gather raw material for thinking
Once saving to Ikes becomes a habit, books you read on paper are no longer just input — they become thinking material you can freely explore later.
- A note from months ago connects with something in a new book
- An insight from a previous read turns out to be useful for a different project
- Scattered learnings gather in one place and become a wellspring of ideas
Deep understanding gained from physical books gets organized, connected, and made searchable through digital tools. Reading stops being solely about accumulating knowledge and becomes an act of growing ideas.
Keep Ikes next to your book. That small, steady habit is what turns reading into an experience that doesn't end when you close the cover.