Notion vs Obsidian for Book Notes: Why Neither Is the Answer
You finished a book. You want to capture something from it. So you open Notion or Obsidian and stare at a blank page, wondering: what template should I use? What properties? Tags? Linked databases? Bi-directional links?
Twenty minutes later, you have formatted a page. You have not written a single thought about the book.
This is the trap. You are comparing two powerful tools, trying to decide which one is better for book notes. The answer is: neither is built for this.
the Notion approach
Notion is a workspace tool. It excels at team wikis, project management, and structured databases. When people use it for book notes, they build reading trackers — databases with columns for author, genre, rating, status, date started, date finished, favorite quotes, and a "notes" field at the bottom.
The reading tracker looks impressive. It is satisfying to maintain. And it is almost entirely useless for retaining what you actually thought about the book.
Here is why: Notion's strength is organization. It makes you think about where to put information and how to categorize it. For book notes, this means you spend more time tagging and templating than thinking. The notes field at the bottom of the database entry — the only part that could contain your actual perspective — is an afterthought.
The result after six months: a beautiful database of books you read, with sparse notes you never revisit.
the Obsidian approach
Obsidian is a knowledge graph tool. It excels at connecting ideas through bi-directional links, building a web of interconnected notes. When people use it for book notes, they create atomic notes, link concepts across books, and build an elaborate graph of their reading history.
This is intellectually appealing. The graph view looks like a constellation of your thinking. But for most readers, it introduces a problem: overhead.
Every book note becomes a decision tree. Should this be one note or five atomic notes? Which existing notes should I link to? Do I need a MOC (Map of Content) for this topic? Should I use the Zettelkasten method or the Evergreen Notes method?
The system works beautifully for researchers and writers who reference their notes daily. For someone who reads a book and wants to remember what they thought about it, it is overengineered.
The result after six months: a graph with hundreds of nodes, most of which you created but never revisited.
the actual problem both tools miss
The issue is not Notion vs Obsidian. The issue is that both tools are designed for managing information — organizing, categorizing, linking, and retrieving other people's ideas.
But when you finish a book, the most valuable thing is not the author's quotes or a structured summary. It is your response. What struck you. What you disagreed with. What connected to something you already knew. What changed how you think about a topic.
That response lives in your head for about 30 minutes after you finish reading. Then it begins to fade. The forgetting curve is steepest in the first hour — you lose roughly 50% of your unprocessed thinking within 20 minutes.
No amount of database columns or bi-directional links recovers that thinking once it is gone.
what actually works for book notes
The readers who retain the most from their reading do something simple: they write a short, unstructured reflection immediately after reading. Not a summary. Not highlights. Their own perspective, in their own words.
This works because of how memory encoding functions. Writing your response forces deep processing — you have to evaluate what you consumed, select what matters to you, and articulate it. This is the cognitive work that converts short-term exposure into long-term understanding.
The reflection does not need tags. It does not need a database. It does not need links to other notes. It needs to exist, and it needs to have been written while the thinking was still fresh.
If those reflections resurface at intervals — 3 days, 7 days, 30 days later — you get the compound effect. You re-encounter your own thinking with fresh eyes. You notice how your perspective has evolved. You make connections across books naturally, without manually linking notes.
when Notion or Obsidian makes sense
Both tools have legitimate use cases that are not book reflection:
Use Notion when you need a reading tracker for accountability (tracking what you have read), when you are managing a research project with collaborators, or when you want a centralized workspace that includes book notes alongside project management.
Use Obsidian when you are a researcher or writer who actively references notes while creating new work, when you want to build a long-term knowledge base across thousands of notes, or when the process of linking ideas is itself part of your creative practice.
Use neither when your goal is simply to remember what you thought about the books you read, develop your perspective over time, and build a habit of reflective reading without organizational overhead.
the 2-sentence test
Here is a test: after finishing your last book, can you write two sentences about what you personally think about it — not what the book said, but your response to it?
If you can, you do not need a complex tool. You need a place to capture those two sentences quickly, and a system that brings them back later.
If you cannot, no tool will help. The problem is not organization — it is that you consumed without processing. The fix is a reflection habit, not a better app.
a different approach
Distill is built specifically for this. You start a session, note what you are consuming, go read (or listen, or watch), then write your reflection. No databases. No graphs. No templates. Just your thinking, captured before it fades.
Those reflections resurface at intervals. Your library grows. Over time, you have a searchable archive of your own perspective — not a collection of someone else's highlights organized in someone else's framework.
It is not a replacement for Notion or Obsidian. It solves a different problem: the one where you read 20 books a year and cannot articulate what you think about any of them.