matteotitta Read book
Turn a book or long PDF into structured, grep-able notes. Same content-consumption pattern every time: ingest → chunk → extract → write a dated clip to the taste-library. The clip is the deliverable — a knowledge asset that /content-strategy and /thought-leadership pull from for evidence, angles, and named frameworks.
Triggers
"read book", "read this book / PDF", "book notes", "extract notes from this PDF", "summarize this ebook", "what's in this book", "pull quotes from this", "extract frameworks from [book]".
What it accepts
| Input | How it's read |
|---|---|
The Read tool reads PDFs natively (~10 pages per call — chunk longer books). The pdf skill handles extraction edge cases. |
|
| Markdown /.txt | Read directly. No conversion. |
| Pasted text | Use what was pasted. Treat a short paste as one chunk. |
| URL (public-domain text) | WebFetch first (free). Firecrawl (firecrawl_scrape) only if the page is JS-heavy or blocked. Project Gutenberg / archive.org .txt URLs are cleanest. |
| EPUB / MOBI | Convert to PDF or markdown first (ebook-convert, calibre), then read as PDF. If no converter is installed, deferred — give the user the one-line install. |
Detect type from the file extension or URL. If ambiguous, ask.
Modes
| Invocation | Mode | What you get |
|---|---|---|
read-book <input> |
notes (default) | Chapter-by-chapter: TL;DR + key concepts + quotes + action items + frameworks |
read-book <input> summary |
summary | Whole-book TL;DR (1 paragraph) + 3–5 takeaways + who-it's-for |
read-book <input> quotes |
quotes | Pull-quote highlights only, with chapter + page refs |
read-book <input> study |
study | Notes + 10–20 spaced-repetition Q&A cards |
Full per-mode templates: the premium reference. A long book (>200 pages) with no mode given defaults to notes — warn it'll take many read passes.
Process
Step 1 — Parse input and mode
Detect the format (table above) and the mode (default notes). Confirm the target book if the input is ambiguous.
Step 2 — Get the text and plan the chunks
Per-source ingestion: the premium reference. Chunk in priority order:
- By chapter when a TOC exists (PDF bookmarks, or converted EPUB chapter headers).
- By 50-page block for PDFs with no TOC.
- By 30,000-char block (~7,500 words) for markdown / text.
Keep a short chunking plan (source, title, author, type, total pages, strategy, chunk list) in the scratchpad — not in the repo.
Step 3 — Read each chunk and extract
Loop: read chunk N → extract per the chosen mode (the premium reference) → append the partial to the scratchpad. For PDFs, read chunks individually — never the whole book in one call (the PDF Read cap is ~10 pages). If a chunk is front-matter or diagrams with nothing to extract, log the skip and continue.
Step 4 — Aggregate into the full notes
Combine the chunk partials into the mode's full-book shape: TL;DR, key takeaways (3–7 — the ones that survive forgetting), who-it's-for, verdict, chapter notes, and cross-reference suggestions.
Step 5 — Write the taste-library clip
The clip is the deliverable. Write to:
projects/research/taste-library/resources/{MMYY}-{slug}.md
{MMYY} = current month+year (0726 = July 2026). {slug} = author + short-title in kebab-case (0726-hormozi-100m-offers.md). Frontmatter matches the taste-library clip convention (below). Confirm the tags against the blessed vocabulary in projects/research/taste-library/CLAUDE.md, and write a real why — a clip without a why is a bookmark, not a taste signal.
Step 6 — Report
In chat: one-line headline (<title> · <author> · <pages or words> · <mode> · <chunks>), the clip path, the TL;DR, and the top 3 takeaways (top 3 quotes for quotes mode).
Evidence discipline
Bound by .claude/rules/evidence-bound-outputs.md. Quotes are the highest-value output and the easiest to corrupt:
- Quote verbatim. Copy the exact words. Never paraphrase into quotation marks.
- Cite the locator. Page number (
p. 84) when available; chapter + paragraph (Ch 3, ¶12) for EPUB-converted books with no stable pages. - Attribute. When the author quotes someone else, name them after the quote. When it's the author, no attribution is needed.
- Never invent. If the book doesn't say it, it doesn't go in the notes. Flag a gap rather than fill it.
Quality notes
- Don't flatten. A 30-page chapter earns 8–15 lines, not 3. Compression is good; flattening loses the specifics that make the clip worth keeping.
- Preserve specifics. Names, numbers, dates, examples — keep them. The point is that later you can grep "what did X say about Y" and find it.
- Action items are explicit. When the book makes you think "I should do X," flag it. These are the highest-leverage lines for GTM work.
- Name the frameworks. When the author names a framework, call it out by name — a framework you remember outperforms ten ideas you forget.
- Push back. In notes and study mode, surface disagreements. Reading critically beats reading reverently.
Error handling
| Failure | Response |
|---|---|
| EPUB/MOBI, no converter | brew install calibre (ebook-convert) or brew install pandoc, then convert to PDF/markdown first. |
| Scanned PDF (no text layer) | OCR first: brew install ocrmypdf && ocrmypdf <in.pdf> <out.pdf>. |
| PDF has no TOC | Fall back to 50-page chunks; note it in the clip. |
| Book >500 pages | Warn on time and read passes; offer summary mode instead of full notes. |
| Chunk extracts nothing | Skip, log, continue — don't fail the whole run. |
Composes with
/content-strategy— book takeaways and frameworks feed cluster planning and content angles./thought-leadership— quotes, frameworks, and pushback become evidence and counterpoints in long-form./deep-research— when a research question surfaces a book, this is the next step; notes feed back into the brief./storytellingand/gtme-pulse— book stories and stats become narrative and newsletter material.
Attribution
Adapts coreyhaines31/makerskills/read-book (MIT, © 2026 Corey Haines), accessed 2026-07-08. Re-pointed at our taste-library as the notes sink.