Commentarii Roamani

Reading produces value when a thought interrupts the page. A sentence lands, a question forms, a connection starts to appear, and then the article keeps moving. What matters is whether that moment turns into something you can work with later.

Roam Reader is your tool for reading intentionally: remix your notes, comment on them, tag them, nest them. Watch our in-depth tutorial on YT here and our thread on X!

It's built around capturing the moment in a form that stays flexible. As you read on the webpage itself, your notes are directly by it, in the sidebar. The article remains intact, with its intended layout and context but your thinking grows alongside it.

Your notes could then be remixed, pulled into other parts of your graph, and reused across projects. Over time, reading produces fewer static traces and more material that stays alive inside your system.

Setting it Up

Visit the Chrome Web Store and find the Roam Reader extension. Then, add it to chrome and pin it to your Address Bar. Go to the article you wish to read or annotate with Roam Reader, click the astrolabe once to sign-in via Google/Apple or Email+Password and a second time to select which graph to use for your reading lists and annotations.

Saving an Article to your Reading List

To save an article to your reading list, click the astrolabe in the top right corner to open the menu. Tweak the metadata as you like, and add some tags. Click on Save To Inbox or some of the other default reading lists like: Shortlist & Archive.

Taking Notes & Highlighting

With the article open, click the astrolabe icon and choose Take Notes instead of saving it to your reading list. A sidebar opens beside the page, where you can start writing notes under today’s date, indented beneath Notes by [[User]].

To highlight, select text in the article and click the highlighter icon that appears. You can also choose a highlight color! Each highlight is added automatically to the sidebar, ordered according to its position in the article. If you indent the empty bullet beneath your most recent highlight, the next highlights will nest underneath it, making it easy to outline and group related passages as you go.

You can add tags and comments as you highlight using the icons provided. Roam handles the formatting for you, inserting the # and indentation automatically.

How It's Organized In Roam

In Roam, to avoid cluttering your graph, saved articles first appear as blocks on [[Reading List: Inbox]]. They remain simple blocks with their metadata nested underneath. Each entry follows the default template set in your Roam Reader settings, which you can change at any time. Only when you start taking notes on an article does it expand into its own page.

If you want more structure, you can update the title template to use a namespace-based format, which keeps reading material grouped and easier to navigate as it grows.

Roam Reader is designed to stay close to how reading on the web already works. Many articles today are readable, carefully laid out, and worth engaging with in their original form. Stripping them down -- as most reader apps do -- often removes context, structure, or even content that matters.

You read where you are, take notes intentionally as ideas land, and let structure form early without interrupting the flow. Notes remain flexible, reusable, and easy to pull into the rest of your graph when they become relevant.

If you already use Roam to think, write, or plan, this fits naturally. Reading becomes another input to your system, shaped as you go, and still usable long after the tab is closed.

onward! roam & read:)
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Bugs, questions, feature ideas? Send them our way: support@roamresearch.com

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