Certainly, hedge fund Elliott Management must not be pleased with the turn of events.

Consuming gives you the illusion of understanding. I make those concepts my own by producing something. A blog post, a slide deck, an illustration helps me to contextualize what I learned. Consuming and producing is like four blind men trying to grasp what an elephant is. Each has his model of the elephant, which is not a comprehensive picture. I share whatever I produced with others and seek their feedback. I triangulate my opinion. With the comments given by others, I can make a complete picture, at least closer to it.

Elsevier have been borging up many of the better options, including SSRN, Bepress, and Mendelay. This is an absolute show-stopper. Zotero seems to be among the more useful tools, though I haven't been able to wrap my head around its organising principles yet. This is unfortunate.

I'm about 98.2331% certain that copyright has a major share of the blame, as an effective system for dealing with digitised documents would all but certainly have to involve duplicating and reverse-engineering them in multiple regards. My solution to the HTML / PDF / ePub, etc., document formats is to recompose them as some minimally sufficient document format (often Markdown, occasionally more advanced formats, with LaTeX being nearly always sufficient). This has resulted in a significant detour through questions concerning typography and just what a document is, though in a huge fraction of cases, there's little reason to go beyond paragraphs, the occasional italic/bold emphasis, and section or chapter markings.

I think it's worth thinking really hard why we're in this state, especially since computing pioneers were actually very optimistic that data and computing would be way more personally malleable than it is now(I've been working on a small comic on this theme myself[2]). For example, check out this short demo[3] of Smalltalk where Alan Kay hooks up a single frame from an animation of a bouncing ball to a painting program, to modify that one frame while also monitoring the loop. Smarter than paper, but way more flexible.

TLDR: when I read I try to read actively, which for me mainly involves using various tools to annotate content: highlight and leave notes as I read. I've programmed data providers that parse them and provide nice interface to interact with this data from other tools. My automated scripts use them to render these annotations in human readable and searchable plaintext and generate TODOs/spaced repetition items. In this post I'm gonna elaborate on all of that and give some motivation, review of these tools (mainly with the focus on open source thus extendable software) and my vision on how they could work in an ideal world. I won't try to convince you that my method of reading and interacting with information is superior for you: it doesn't have to be, and there are people out there more eloquent than me who do that. I assume you want this too and wondering about the practical details.

Mind that free version of Instapaper has got 5 notes per month limit. Personally I'm happy to pay 3$ per month for premium version of such a decent product though in absence of good alternatives. Instapaper got Json API, through which you can access your saved articles, comments and highlights. I'm using a fork of python wrapper to access it. Highlights are only stored as text though (as opposed to CSS/xpath locators), so there is no easy way to match them against original text apart from some sort of fuzzy search.

won't really write much about it for one reason which is a big deal: while you can highlight text, you can't leave notes. Nearest functionality is 'recommending' a highlight while reading a comment, but that's only displayed on your 'timeline'. Pocket API doesn't support exporting highlights too, or to be precise it seems to be hidden. If you need it you can use my script where I hacked around it