Research Highlights

Whatever you've highlighted or annotated in Apple Books, browsable from inside the project you're writing, and one keystroke from becoming a quoted passage in your prose — with a citation that names its source, not just a floating quote.

Getting your highlights in

Sgeulai never reads Apple Books' own library directly — no sandboxed app can. The path in is the free Highlights app, which does the job of getting your annotations out of Apple Books' own container and into two plain files in one folder:

~/Library/Application Support/Highlights/HighlightsBackup.json — the highlights and notes themselves
~/Library/Application Support/Highlights/MetadataCache.json — extended details Highlights looked up for each book (see Extended book details below)

The first time, Import ▸ Import Highlights (Apple Books)… opens a picker already pointed at that folder — confirm it and you're done. Sgeulai keeps a standing grant to that whole folder after that (a security-scoped bookmark, the same mechanism any sandboxed app uses to remember a location you picked once), so the same one-time grant covers both files — and anything else Highlights writes there later — with nothing further to ask for. Every later import runs with no picker at all: the same menu command, or just opening Research Highlights… itself, re-reads both files and adds whatever's new. Importing is additive — a highlight already known by its own stable ID is skipped, never duplicated, so re-running it costs nothing.

Both files are only as fresh as the last time you opened the Highlights app yourself — neither watches Apple Books live. Open Highlights after reading or annotating something new, then come back to Sgeulai; the next time Research Highlights opens, it picks the change up on its own.

If no backup exists yet — the Highlights app was never installed, or never opened — the same command explains that and offers to locate a file yourself instead. That fallback picks the backup file only; extended book details aren't available until the folder itself is granted.

Extended book details

Beyond a book's title and author, Highlights can look up more — a publisher, publication year, ISBN, language, a description, and subject or genre tags — whenever an online lookup found them. Not every book gets all of these; a personal library is usually a mix of richly-detailed and mostly blank entries, depending on what Highlights was able to find.

Whatever's known lands in two places, once the folder above is granted:

Browsing

Tools ▸ Research Highlights… opens a two-pane browser: books down the left, that book's highlights and notes on the right, sorted by when you made them. A search field narrows both panes at once, and a segmented control next to it scopes what the search actually matches — All by default, or narrow to just Book (title and author), Quotes (the highlighted passage), or Notes (whatever you wrote alongside it).

Inserting into the manuscript

⌃⌘7 in the manuscript editor, or the highlighter icon in its toolbar, opens the same browser in picker mode — click a highlight instead of just reading it, and it's inserted at the cursor as a blockquote:

“The highlighted passage.” (a durable link back to the highlight, invisible in the rendered prose)

Inserting this way also does two things a plain paste never would. First, it's recorded on the current scene or chapter's own Sources & Citations list — matched to an existing Source entry for that book if one exists, or a new one created on the spot from whatever the highlight itself knows: title, author, and (when the book has an ibooks:// link Apple Books can resolve) an Open in Apple Books link on the Source's own Connections tab — plus publisher, year, ISBN, language, an abstract and keyword tags when the extended book details above have them. A highlight from a book you've cited before adds to that same Source rather than splitting it in two. Second, it's marked as a quoted source the same way a citation or a pasted image is — never flagged by the AI-authorship detection that watches for pasted prose, because it isn't prose you wrote, it's a quote you attributed.

Inserting into notes and comments

The same highlighter icon appears in the note/comment editor's own toolbar, and inserts the identical quote-plus-link. The difference is scope: a note or comment has no manuscript entity to attach a citation to, so nothing is added to any Sources list here — this path is for research context sitting next to your notes, not for something the manuscript itself cites.

A third path exists on a record's own Sources & Citations tab: Insert from Highlights… opens the picker and prefills the Add Citation form from whatever you chose, matching an existing Source the same way the manuscript path does — but, unlike inserting into prose, it only ever matches; creating the Source entry itself is left to you, in the form it opens into.

Reading an inserted highlight

Hover the inserted link and a tooltip shows the quoted passage and the book it came from, without leaving the page — plus publisher and year on the same line, when known. Click it, and a popover opens with the book's title and author, that same publisher/year/ISBN line, the full quote, your own note on it if you wrote one in Highlights, subject tags and a description when Highlights found them, and two buttons: Open in Apple Books (disabled when the highlight carries no book link) and Copy Text, which flips briefly to a green “Copied” to confirm it took. This same popover is what opens from a row in the Research Highlights browser itself, so the extended details are visible there too, before a highlight is ever inserted anywhere.