How to Take Notes on Audiobooks: Clips, Bookmarks and What Helps You Remember

To take notes on an audiobook, pause the moment a line matters, say or type a few words of your own, and drop a bookmark or clip in the app so you can find the exact spot again. At the end of each chapter, write two or three sentences from memory before you press play. That last step does more for memory than any amount of highlighting. Audible, Libby and hoopla all let you attach a note to a bookmark. Apple Books and Spotify document no bookmark tool at all, so there you note the chapter and the time on the slider instead.

The research on note-taking has a clear shape. Writing notes while you listen helps a little and costs attention. Reviewing those notes and testing yourself on them is where most of the gain is. Audiobooks make the first part harder than a lecture, because the narrator never waits for your pen, and easier than a lecture, because you own the pause button. This guide covers both halves: how to capture a line without losing the thread, and what to do with it afterwards so it stays with you.

Why can't I take notes while listening?

Because note-taking is hard work on its own, and listening leaves you no slack.

In a 2005 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Piolat, Olive and Kellogg measured how much attention different tasks take by timing people's reactions to a signal while they worked. Taking notes demanded more effort than reading or learning the same material, and only a little less than writing an original text. Your mind is composing while it listens.

Then there is pace. A narrator reads at about 150 words a minute, which is far faster than anyone writes. Students in lectures face the same gap, and they lose most of the content. A 2018 review by Kiewra, Colliot and Lu reports that students record, on average, only about a third of a lesson's important ideas. What they do write down is what they keep. In a 1975 study of 180 students who heard a recorded lecture, Aiken, Thomas and Shennum found that a point in a student's notes had a 47% chance of being recalled later, against 12% for a point left out, as summarised in a 2017 review by Jansen, Lakens and IJsselsteijn.

That same 2017 review makes the other half of the point. Note-taking adds mental load on top of simply following the material, and for some people in some situations that load tips over into less understanding, not more. If you have ever paused an audiobook to type a sentence and found you had lost the plot, that was the cost showing.

Listening also wanders. In a 2013 study of 211 students, Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek found minds off task at about half of the check-ins while listening (0.51), against about a third (0.36) during silent reading. We cover that in how to focus on audiobooks. Notes give your attention a job, which helps, as long as the note is short.

The good news is a 1991 experiment by Kiewra, Mayer and colleagues. Students who could pause and replay a recorded lesson at will noted 65% of its details, against 38% for students who heard it once straight through. You have that control over every audiobook. Use it.

How do you take notes when listening to audiobooks?

Seven methods, roughly in the order you would use them in one book.

1. Pause and write one line in your own words

The moment a line matters, pause and write one sentence you will understand next month. Not the narrator's sentence. Yours.

Whether pen or keyboard is better turns out not to matter. The famous 2014 finding by Mueller and Oppenheimer that handwriting beats typing did not survive replication. Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson found in 2019 that test scores did not consistently differ between longhand, laptop and a group that took no notes at all. In 2021 Urry and colleagues repeated the original study with 142 students and pooled eight similar studies: laptop notes contained more words and more copied text, and scores were the same (an effect size of 0.04, which is nothing).

What is better established is that capturing fast and organising later works. In a 2013 series of three experiments with 76 to 80 students each, Bui, Myerson and Hale had people take notes on an 11-minute recorded lecture. Typing down as much as possible gave the best recall straight away. Organised notes gave the best recall a day later. And people who had typed everything and then studied their notes did better on the delayed test too. For an audiobook that means: a quick capture now, a tidy summary at the chapter break.

2. Say it instead of typing it

On a walk or at the sink, speaking a note is faster and safer than typing one.

• iPhone. In the Notes app, start an audio recording and speak. Apple's guide says spoken words in supported languages are transcribed automatically, and you can swipe down from the top of the screen to type alongside the recording. Voice Memos transcribes recordings too. Both need a supported language and a recent iPhone.
• Android. In Google Keep, create a note, tap the recording button, then Speak. Keep saves the audio and the words. Pixel phones also transcribe in the Recorder app.

Say the chapter and the gist, not a full thought. "Chapter 9, the bit about why the plan failed." You will find the full thought again with the next method.

3. Drop a bookmark or clip, add the note later

Every bookmark is a promise to come back. Make it at the moment, write the note at the break.

In Audible, the Clip button saves 30 seconds of audio and a bookmark; you can trim the clip to anything from 5 to 44 seconds and add a note to it. In Libby, tap the bookmark icon, or hold it to save a whole passage, then add a note. hoopla lets you add notes to any bookmark. Details for each app are below.

Then pause for real. The evidence for pausing comes from lectures. In 1987 Ruhl, Hughes and Schloss gave undergraduates three 2-minute pauses during a lecture to compare and complete their notes, and the pause groups scored higher on both a free recall test and an objective test. In a 2014 study of 148 medical students by Bachhel and Thaman, three short pauses per lecture lifted scores on a 30-question test taken 15 days later from 21.1 to 23.0, and 83.6% of the students said the pauses helped them remember. In 2016 Luo, Kiewra and Samuelson played a 14-minute recording at 136 words a minute and found that students who revised their notes during pauses did better than students who revised after the end.

Chapter breaks are your pauses. A bookmark lands on a timestamp, not on a sentence, so when you come back you will replay a minute to find the line. A read-along app that shows the words lets you mark the sentence itself, which is one reason I built HushBook.

4. Write a chapter summary from memory

Before you start the next chapter, close the notes and write two or three sentences about what just happened or what the chapter argued. From memory, then check.

This is the method with the strongest evidence behind it. Pulling something out of memory strengthens it more than putting it in again. In a 2006 study of 120 students, Roediger and Karpicke found that people who tested themselves on a passage recalled 56% of it a week later, against 42% for people who re-read it. In 2011 Karpicke and Blunt had 80 students either practise recall or build a concept map; a week later the recall group answered 67% of questions correctly and the concept-map group 45%. A 2014 meta-analysis by Rowland pooled 159 comparisons from 61 studies and found a medium advantage for testing over re-studying (0.50), with 81% of the comparisons favouring the test.

Summaries work when they are written from memory in a pause. In a 2024 study of 203 students, Lawson and Mayer had people write short summaries in breaks between segments of an online lesson. They scored higher than a control group straight away (an effect size of 0.48) and a week later (0.54). Drawing pictures of the content did not help. One caution: Dunlosky's 2013 review rates summarising as low utility for students who have not been taught to do it well. The fix is to keep it short and to check it against the book.

More on this in how to retain information from audiobooks.

5. Highlight only when you can see the words

With audio alone there is nothing to highlight. Libby's "highlight" saves a stretch of audio. Audible's clip saves a stretch of audio. Neither gives you the sentence as text.

Highlighting is also weaker than it feels. In their 2013 review of ten study techniques, Dunlosky and colleagues rated highlighting and underlining as "low utility" and warned it "may actually hurt performance on higher-level tasks that require inference making." A 2022 meta-analysis by Ponce, Mayer and Méndez pooled 85 effect sizes from 36 articles and found that highlighting your own text improved memory a little (0.36) and comprehension less (0.20). Treat a highlight as a bookmark on a sentence, not as learning.

When you want that bookmark on the sentence, you need the text. If you own both the Audible and Kindle editions, Audible's Read & Listen shows the Kindle text while the audio plays and you can highlight there. With a read-along app the text comes from the recording itself. In HushBook you tap Mark, tap the first and last word, and keep the passage as a highlight, a quote or a note; the audio pauses while you type.

6. Review within a day, then turn notes into questions

Notes you never reread are the notes you never took. Kiewra's 1985 review in Educational Psychologist separated the two benefits of note-taking: writing the notes helps on its own, and reviewing them helps again. The 2018 review by Kiewra, Colliot and Lu reports that the second benefit is the larger one.

The best review is a test. Turn each note into a question ("Why did the plan fail?") and answer it before you look. Rowland's meta-analysis found the advantage of testing over re-reading was larger when the final test came a day or more later (0.69 against 0.41 for tests within the day), which is exactly the gap between tonight's chapter and tomorrow's commute.

7. Slow down for the dense parts

You cannot take notes at 2x. In a 2022 study in Applied Cognitive Psychology, Murphy and colleagues found that lecture videos at 1.5x and 2x cost little on an immediate test, but scores dropped beyond 2x. Comprehension holds at speed; capturing does not. For the chapters you plan to take notes on, drop to 1x and use the 30-second rewind freely. Our guide to audiobook listening speed covers how to find your speed.

How to take notes on Audible

Audible's notes live inside clips and bookmarks. According to Audible's help page "Manage clips & notes":

1. In the Audible app, tap the +Clip icon on the player. It saves the previous 30 seconds and adds a bookmark at the same time.
2. Tap Clips & Notes on the player screen to see your clips. Open a clip's menu and choose Edit Clip, then drag the handles to trim it to anything from 5 to 44 seconds.
3. Type into the note field on the same screen and tap Save.

Two limits. Clips are app only: Audible says you cannot add or manage clips from the website. And there is no export. Readwise, a highlights service, says Audible "doesn't make it possible to extract bookmarks or clips through the cloud." If you also own the Kindle edition, pause Audible, open the Kindle app at the same spot and highlight there; Kindle highlights do sync. We cover how the two editions link in can you read along with Audible?

How to bookmark an audiobook in Libby, hoopla, Apple Books and Spotify

Libby

Libby has the most complete tools of any library app. From Libby's help page on audiobooks:

• Bookmark: tap the bookmark icon at the top of the player.
• Highlight a passage: play the audiobook, then tap and hold the bookmark icon.
• Note: open your bookmarks, pick one, and tap Make a note.
• Keep them: bookmarks, notes and highlights stay with the title and "reappear there if you borrow the book again."
• Export them: even after the loan is returned, open the title's Reading Journey, then Actions, then Export Reading Data. Choose Table for a web page or Spreadsheet for a file; "Exporting your highlights includes any notes." Deleting a title's Reading Journey deletes the notes with it.

What Libby cannot do is show you the text of the audiobook. See can Libby read to you?

hoopla

hoopla's audiobook page lists a digital bookmark to save your place and the option to "add notes to any bookmark for future reference."

Apple Books

Apple's iPhone guide for listening to audiobooks in Books lists a speed dial, a sleep timer, chapters and a time slider. It lists no bookmark or note tool. If you use Books, pause and write the chapter and the time shown on the slider into Notes.

Spotify

Spotify's support page for audiobooks lists play speed, 15-second skips forward and back, a sleep timer, rating, sharing and downloading. Nothing about bookmarks. A request for audiobook bookmarks on the Spotify Community is marked closed. The workaround is the same: pause, note the chapter and the time. Spotify also shows no text while an audiobook plays; see can you read along with Spotify audiobooks?

Can you highlight audiobooks?

Not the audio itself. A highlight needs text, and most audiobook apps have none. What you can do:

• Audible with Kindle: own both editions and highlight the Kindle text while the audio plays through Read & Listen.
• Libby: hold the bookmark icon to save an audio passage, which Libby calls a highlight. It is a clip, not words.
• Read-along apps: apps that show the words as they are spoken let you mark the words themselves. HushBook does this for audiobook files you own and for its free classics.

Does Audible have a transcription feature?

No. Audible does not show a transcript or captions for its audiobooks. The closest thing is Read & Listen, which shows the text of the Kindle edition in sync with the audio, and only when you own both. Apps like HushBook build the text from the audio on your phone, for files you can import, but Audible downloads are copy-protected and cannot be imported. Our guide to audiobooks with captions covers every service.

What the evidence does not show

• No study has tested note-taking on audiobooks at home. Every study above used lectures, lab passages or online lessons with students, mostly over minutes, not hours.
• The pause studies paused a lecturer; the audiobook listener pauses themselves, and whether self-chosen pauses work as well has not been tested.
• The 1975 recall figures come from a review of the original study, not the paper itself, and the 1987 pause study reports significance without exact scores or a sample size I could confirm.
• The summary study used short lesson segments, not chapters, and Dunlosky's review warns that untrained summarisers gain little.
• Highlighting research is about text; nobody has measured whether marking a sentence in a read-along app helps more than a timestamp bookmark.
• App features change. The Audible, Libby, hoopla, Apple and Spotify details above were read from their help pages on 1 November 2026.

Taking notes in HushBook

HushBook is an audiobook player for iPhone and Android that shows the words as the narrator reads them. It transcribes the recording on your phone and highlights each word as it is spoken, so a note can sit on a sentence instead of on a timestamp. While you read along, tap Mark, tap the first word and the last word, and keep the passage as a highlight, a quote or a note. The audio pauses while you write and you can play from the mark later. Quotes can be shared as cards. Each book also has a notes page for chapter takeaways and questions, and everything you mark is listed by chapter under Quotes & notes. The free catalogue of LibriVox and Internet Archive classics works the same way, and nothing is uploaded or needs an account.

Honest limits. The text comes from speech recognition, so unusual names can come out wrong and a mark on a misheard word will look odd. HushBook plays files you can import, such as MP3, M4A and M4B, and its free library; it cannot import copy-protected books from Audible, Libby, hoopla, Apple Books or Spotify. Your marks and notes stay in the app rather than exporting as a file.

Sources

• Piolat, Olive and Kellogg (2005), "Cognitive effort during note taking", Applied Cognitive Psychology
• Kiewra, Colliot and Lu (2018), "Note This: How to Improve Student Note Taking", IDEA Paper 73
• Aiken, Thomas and Shennum (1975), "Memory for a lecture: Effects of notes, lecture rate, and informational density", Journal of Educational Psychology
• Jansen, Lakens and IJsselsteijn (2017), "An integrative review of the cognitive costs and benefits of note-taking", Educational Research Review
• Varao Sousa, Carriere and Smilek (2013), "The way we encounter reading material influences how frequently we mind wander", Frontiers in Psychology
• Kiewra, Mayer, Christensen, Kim and Risch (1991), "Effects of repetition on recall and note-taking: Strategies for learning from lectures", Journal of Educational Psychology
• Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014), "The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard", Psychological Science
• Morehead, Dunlosky and Rawson (2019), "How Much Mightier Is the Pen than the Keyboard for Note-Taking? A Replication and Extension of Mueller and Oppenheimer (2014)", Educational Psychology Review
• Urry and colleagues (2021), "Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: A Direct Replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer's (2014) Study 1 Plus Mini Meta-Analyses Across Similar Studies", Psychological Science
• Bui, Myerson and Hale (2013), "Note-taking with computers: Exploring alternative strategies for improved recall", Journal of Educational Psychology
• Ruhl, Hughes and Schloss (1987), "Using the Pause Procedure to Enhance Lecture Recall", Teacher Education and Special Education
• Bachhel and Thaman (2014), "Effective Use of Pause Procedure to Enhance Student Engagement and Learning", Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research
• Luo, Kiewra and Samuelson (2016), "Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement", Instructional Science
• Roediger and Karpicke (2006), "Test-Enhanced Learning", Psychological Science
• Karpicke and Blunt (2011), "Retrieval Practice Produces More Learning than Elaborative Studying with Concept Mapping", Science
• Rowland (2014), "The effect of testing versus restudy on retention: A meta-analytic review of the testing effect", Psychological Bulletin
• Lawson and Mayer (2024), "Generative learning activities for online multimedia learning: when summarizing is effective but drawing is not", Frontiers in Psychology
• Dunlosky, Rawson, Marsh, Nathan and Willingham (2013), "Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques", Psychological Science in the Public Interest
• Ponce, Mayer and Méndez (2022), "Effects of Learner-Generated Highlighting and Instructor-Provided Highlighting on Learning from Text: A Meta-Analysis", Educational Psychology Review
• Kiewra (1985), "Investigating Notetaking and Review: A Depth of Processing Alternative", Educational Psychologist
• Murphy, Hoover, Agadzhanyan, Kuehn and Castel (2022), "Learning in double time: The effect of lecture video speed on immediate and delayed comprehension", Applied Cognitive Psychology
• Audible Help, "Manage clips & notes"
• Audible, "Read & Listen"
• Readwise Docs, "Import from Other Sources"
• Libby Help, "Adding bookmarks, notes, and highlights in an audiobook"
• Libby Help, "Exporting notes and highlights"
• Libby Help, "Deleting a title's Reading Journey"
• hoopla, "Tap into Audiobooks on hoopla"
• Apple Support, "Listen to audiobooks in the Books app on iPhone"
• Spotify Support, "Audiobooks"
• Apple Support, "Record and transcribe audio in Notes on iPhone"
• Apple Support, "View a Voice Memos transcription on iPhone"
• Google Keep Help, "Create or edit a note" (Android)
• Google Pixel Phone Help, "Create, edit & manage transcriptions"