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Postilae is a reading workspace: it lets you read PDF, EPUB, and DOCX files, take notes and highlights, organize books and reading sessions, and connect your reading to written projects and ideas.
Postilae is currently offered free of charge.
You can explore the Service without an account, but nothing is normally retained unless you create one. Work in an unauthenticated session is lost when you close or reload the app. If you deliberately begin creating an account, Postilae temporarily places a same-tab handoff copy in browser session storage so your current work can survive the authentication redirect. That handoff expires within 24 hours, is not uploaded before authentication and passphrase setup, and is removed when signup is completed, rejected, or expires.
Readwise
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Postilae's answer:
Postilae is a single container for the whole lifecycle of a reading-based project. Most tools cover one slice โ a reference manager, a note app, a PDF annotator, a word processor โ so your sources, quotes and drafts end up scattered. In Postilae you import PDF, EPUB and DOCX sources, annotate and highlight them, capture quotes with auto-formatted citations (MLA, APA, Chicago), connect ideas on a mind map, track milestones from research to submitted, and export a Word-ready draft โ without leaving the workspace. Everything is private by default: your library stays on your device, and optional cloud sync is end-to-end encrypted with a passphrase only you hold.
Postilae's answer:
Because it replaces a fragmented stack (reference manager + note app + annotator + word processor) with one continuous workflow, so a highlight you make while reading is already linked to the quote, the idea and the project chapter it belongs to โ no re-typing, no copy-paste archaeology. It also has a genuinely comfortable reader (reflowable text, dual navigation, page-flip thumbnails, bookmarks, in-page search, pinch-zoom, three calm themes) instead of treating reading as an afterthought. And privacy is structural, not a policy promise: sync is encrypted client-side, so nobody โ including us โ can read your library.
Postilae's answer:
Researchers, PhD and graduate students, academics, writers and serious non-fiction readers โ anyone who reads a lot of long-form sources and has to turn that reading into something: a thesis, a paper, an essay, a book, a report. It also fits self-directed learners who want their reading to accumulate into structured knowledge rather than a folder of forgotten PDFs.
Postilae's answer:
The name comes from postillae โ the marginal glosses medieval readers wrote beside a text. That's the idea: the value of reading lives in the margins, in what you note, question and connect. Postilae started from the frustration of a scattered workflow โ annotations in one app, citations in another, the actual writing somewhere else, and half the thinking lost between them. It was built to keep reading, annotating and writing in one calm, private space, from the first source to the finished draft.
Postilae's answer:
React 19 with TanStack Start and TanStack Router, TypeScript, Vite 7 and Tailwind CSS on the frontend; pdf.js, epub.js and docx for reading and exporting PDF/EPUB/DOCX; IndexedDB for local, offline-first document storage; Web Crypto (AES-GCM-256) for client-side end-to-end encryption; and a Postgres backend with row-level security for accounts and encrypted sync. Deployed as a PWA on an edge runtime.
I imported my kindle highlights, as many others. Now I daily review some highlights (thanks to a dashboard, I am motivated). And where I didn't create highlights, as I only listened to the audiobooks, I get the highlights from others. It also allows to create beautiful quotes. It adds the book cover and matches quote and background with colours found on the book title! Really nice!
Based on our record, Readwise seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 88 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.
Anyway, as I reached the end of the chapter, I wanted to read my Readwise's daily recap. However, my iPhone was in other room. I didnโt want to get up; I was tired. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
The only highlights that Readwise retrieves semi-automatically are from the books I buy from Kindle, by going into the Readwise app and clicking a button. If I upload them to Kindle or need highlights from the Apple Books app, I have to open the book, go to my highlights, select them all, and then email them to a Readwise email address. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
Readwise also has this feature. I get a daily email with a random assortment of highlights that have been pulled in from multiple sources (Reader, Notion, Kindle, etc.) The product benefit in their case is that it's kind of like Zapier, but for notes. https://readwise.io/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
Go to readwise.io and create an account if you don't already have one. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
Sign up for a Readwise account if you haven't already readwise.io. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
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Instapaper - Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages for reading later.
Notion - All-in-one workspace. One tool for your whole team. Write, plan, and get organized.
Obsidian.md - A second brain, for you, forever. Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
Hardcover - Hardcover is a social network for people to track what they read and want to read, make lasting connections with other readers and find life-changing books.We're anti-Amazon, pro-author, actively pursuing feedback and just getting started.