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Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader API

Actions5

Overview

This node integrates with the Readwise Reader API to create new documents in a user's Readwise Reader account. It is useful for automating the addition of web content, notes, articles, or other document types into Readwise for later reading, annotation, or archiving.

Typical use cases include:

  • Automatically saving URLs or HTML content from other workflows into Readwise.
  • Adding metadata such as author, category, tags, and publication date to documents.
  • Organizing documents by location (e.g., new, later, archive) upon creation.
  • Enriching saved documents with summaries, cover images, and notes.

For example, you could use this node to save an article URL along with a custom title and tags directly from a web scraping workflow.

Properties

Name Meaning
Url The unique URL of the document. If no real URL is available, a made-up URL can be provided (e.g., https://yourapp.com#document1).
Additional Fields A collection of optional fields to enrich the document:
- Author The document's author; overwrites any original author found during parsing.
- Category The type/category of the document. Options: Article, Email, EPUB, Highlight, Note, PDF, RSS, Tweet, Video. Defaults to "article" if not specified.
- HTML The document's content in valid HTML. If omitted, the node attempts to scrape the URL to fetch HTML content automatically.
- Image URL URL of an image to use as the document's cover image.
- Location Initial location/status of the document within Readwise. Options: New, Later, Archive, Feed. If the chosen location is not enabled in user settings, defaults to the user's default location.
- Notes A top-level note attached to the document.
- Published Date ISO 8601 datetime string representing when the document was published (e.g., "2020-07-14T20:11:24+00:00"). Default timezone is UTC.
- Saved Using Source or method by which the document was saved.
- Should Clean HTML Boolean flag indicating whether to automatically clean the provided HTML and parse metadata like title and author. Only applicable if HTML content is provided.
- Summary A summary text describing the document.
- Tags Comma-separated list of tags (e.g., "tag1,tag2") to associate with the document. Tags are trimmed and split into an array before sending.
- Title The document's title; overwrites the original title if present.

Output

The node outputs JSON data representing the created document as returned by the Readwise Reader API. This typically includes all the document's metadata such as its ID, URL, title, author, category, tags, location, and timestamps.

If the node supports binary data output (not indicated here), it would represent associated files or media related to the document, but this node primarily deals with JSON document data.

Dependencies

  • Requires an API key credential for authenticating with the Readwise Reader API.
  • The node makes HTTP requests to https://readwise.io/api/v3.
  • Proper configuration of the API key credential in n8n is necessary for successful operation.

Troubleshooting

  • Invalid or missing URL: The "Url" property is required. Ensure it is provided and correctly formatted.
  • Authentication errors: Verify that the API key credential is correctly set up and has sufficient permissions.
  • Invalid field values: For example, providing an unsupported category or location may cause the API to reject the request or fallback to defaults.
  • HTML cleaning issues: If should_clean_html is true but the HTML is malformed, the node might fail to parse metadata properly.
  • Tag formatting: Tags must be comma-separated strings; improper formatting may lead to unexpected tag assignment.

Common error messages will generally come from the Readwise API and should be addressed by checking the input properties and credentials.

Links and References

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