Passagebook

Passagebook is a term used to describe a digital collection that gathers excerpts or passages from multiple texts into a single organized notebook. It emphasizes intertextual links, user annotations, and thematic organization over the full text of any single source. The concept is used in education, research, and personal study to facilitate close reading, comparison, and evidence gathering.

A passagebook typically includes tools to clip passages from books, articles, or web pages, and to attach notes, keywords, or tags. Users can create cross-references between passages, search within the collection, and organize items by topic, author, or project. Many implementations offer export options that preserve citations or metadata and allow integration with note-taking apps or citation managers. Collaborative features may enable sharing passagebooks with others or annotating jointly.

In practice, passagebooks support activities such as literary analysis, scholarly research, and academic writing. They help users track supporting quotes, compare perspectives across sources, and build a modular archive of ideas. The approach aligns with broader trends in digital annotation and knowledge management, where users curate personal repositories of meaningful text fragments rather than maintaining separate, siloed libraries.

Because passagebook is a descriptive term rather than a single product, its exact functionality varies by platform. The term is often used to describe any system that prioritizes clipping, annotating, and organizing passages to support study, analysis, and writing, whether embedded in an e-reader, a note-taking tool, or a research platform.