How to Take Notes on Audiobooks Using a Handheld Voice Recorder

In this video, I'll share how I take notes when I am listening to audiobooks using a handheld recorder.

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**** A full transcript can be found at www.marblejar.net. ****

Hi, everyone!  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll share how I take notes when I am listening to audiobooks using a handheld recorder.

I listen to a lot of audiobooks.  And for whatever reason, I prefer listening to non-fiction rather than fiction.  The problem is that it's much harder to take notes while I'm listening to a book.  And if you've seen any of my other videos, you'll know that in order to retain anything, I *have* to take notes since I have a world class bad memory.  I have tried lots of options, which I'll recount for you:
- First I tried using the bookmarks in the audiobook to mark passages that I want to go back to. This doesn't work for me.  First of all, it's kind of dangerous since I'm usually driving while I'm listening, plus it's never clear to me whether the bookmark starts earlier than when you hit it, so I'm always having to back up the audio, and let's be honest, I never actually go back in and listen to these passages.
- I've also tried to use the voice recorder on the iPhone.  So, I'm playing my audiobook on the iPhone and then I have to switch to a different app to record a note.  Yeah -- this is a terrible and dangerous idea also -- too many buttons and manipulations for this to work out well.
- What had worked the best up until now is to actually  get a physical or electronic copy of the book out of the library and essentially read the whole thing over again while highlighting passages and taking notes.  So, this gives me good notes, but I basically have to read the whole book twice -- once on audio and once to take notes -- so it's not the best use of my time.

Here's what I do now and I'm completely obsessed with this new technique.  I bought an old school handheld voice recorder.  This is the one I bought from Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07CPNR79C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1), but I think they all essentially do the same thing -- record starts the recording and you can stop and start as many times as you want by hitting the pause button.  Then you save the recording by hitting stop.  So, now I start listening to my audiobook with this recorder in my hand.  I also go ahead and start the recording since that takes about 10 seconds to get going and just hit pause until there is a note that I'd like to voice record.  Basically, from then on, as I'm listening, I just unpause and pause the recording to take notes until I'm done with that recording session.  Then I hit Stop to save it.  I could have 10-20 recorded files for a book, depending on how long each recording session was, but they are labeled 1 through whatever.  I've found this to be something I can do easily while driving and also while doing other chores around the house -- as long as I'm able to stop what I'm doing and record a note. 

Then, when I'm ready to transcribe the notes, the first thing I do is find the table of contents for the book to start my note to help me organize.  The best place that I have found to get a table of contents is generally from Amazon's "Look Inside" feature.  This gives you just a sample of the book -- usually the first 20 pages or so -- which generally includes the table of contents.  The problem is that this is just an image, so you can't cut and paste the text from it.  Instead, I do this with my iPad and take a screen shot of however many pages of the table of contents there are, crop it to include just the appropriate text and then use the TextGrabber app to extract the text from the image.   I then paste this into a new note in Evernote.

Once I have done that, I either plug the voice recorder into my computer and transfer the files to the computer or, if there isn't too much to listen to, transcribe directly from the voice recorder.  So, now it's just a matter of listening and typing.  If I do transfer the audio files to the computer, I use the keyboard shortcuts to help me out.  I have a Mac, so pausing the voice recording can be done with the spacebar and I can use Command + Tab to switch back to Evernote.  This helps me to continue transcribing without the distraction of taking my fingers off of the keyboard. 

This new technique of using a handheld voice recorder is far better than anything else I've tried.  This allows me to take notes as I listen, without having to switch to a different app or write something down by hand.  It means that I only have to read the book one time, which saves me time in the end.  Most of the books that I summarize and review for this channel I listened to on audiobook, so you'll be able to benefit from this process as well.  Let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

Видео How to Take Notes on Audiobooks Using a Handheld Voice Recorder канала Marble Jar Channel