I believe in transparency about my content creation process, so I wanted to share how these book-based essays come together using a combination of personal reading, note-taking, and AI assistance.
Content Development Process
1. Complete Reading and Highlighting
I start by reading the entire book (primarily on my Kindle), highlighting passages that contain valuable insights, actionable advice, or concepts along with small notes as I read the book. This frees me to engage with the book without worrying if I can recall this later on or not. I prefer Kindle as I can transfer all these at a later stage easily
2. Refinement of Highlights
Once I’ve finished reading, I review all my highlights and make adjustments. I remove highlights that seem less valuable upon reflection, add some personal notes to existing highlights and add new ones where I need more context or supporting information. My goal is to ensure that I capture anything and everything that I find important.
3. Personal Knowledge Management
All my refined highlights get transferred into my personal knowledge base in Obsidian via Kindle Plugin. This allows me to refer to any insight at a later stage if needed rather than opening the book.
4. AI-Assisted Synthesis
I use a custom AI prompt that I’ve developed over time to help synthesize my learning from books. This prompt transforms my raw highlights into structured, actionable essays. I currently use Claude as my AI model of choice for all written content generation
5. Personal Review and Editing
I carefully review the AI-generated essays and make edits where needed. Since the primary purpose is to serve my own learning, I focus on ensuring the content accurately reflects what I want to remember for long term, presenting it in a way that will be useful to me in the future.
6. Publishing as a Quality Enhancement Tool
I’ve discovered that writing with the intention to publish produces higher quality results. The public nature of sharing encourages me to edit more thoroughly and present ideas more clearly
AI’s Role
I use an AI prompt that helps to convert my book highlights into a series of interconnected, actionable blog post segments. I instruct AI to analyze the highlights, identify major themes, and create structured, practical content that emphasizes application over theory.
The prompt specifies a clear structure for each segment (introduction, body with actionability focus, key takeaways, action plan, and reflection questions), ensures readability at a specific level, and maintains strict adherence to the book’s content without adding external information. This process allows me to retain more of what I read by generating an essay that I can easily refer when required
This process allows me to retain my personal perspective (through my highlight selection) while using AI to handle the organizational heavy lifting. Hopefully, the result is something that reflects what I found valuable in the book, presented in a format that allows me to refer when needed
Why This Approach Is Better Than AI Book Summaries
I’ve found this approach much better than simply asking AI to summarize an entire book. Most AI book summaries miss crucial insights as they take a one-size-fits-all approach, which doesn’t align with me. I primarily use such summaries as a screening tool to evaluate whether to read a book, not as a substitute for actually reading a book.
My process ensures that the final essay reflect what I personally found most valuable, based on my own analysis. The AI serves as an organizational tool working with my notes and highlights, rather than deciding what’s important in the book.
This process will always be a work in progress as you my book notes keep getting updates and improved with passage of time.
Please note that I won’t be able to share the raw highlights themselves to avoid copyright infringement.