I can tell you put in a load of work here, well done!

You mean the when you copy paste you lost the text styling and headings, right? Like italics and h2s?

I don't know what program you're using to write, but if you're using Google docs, or you export your file to Google docs, you can get the html in a cleaned-up format (no extraneous code) from a tool like this one.

Then convert the html to markdown. I'd ask gpt to do that, or there are also dedicated tools for it, like this one.

It sounds like a pain but I don't think that would take more than 10 minutes after you've done it once or twice. Hope it helps - maybe try it and drop the results in a comment here?

It's hard for me to give constructive feedback without knowing intended audience. Who did you write it for and what do you want the reader to take away from the piece?

As Seth Godin would ask "Who's it for? What's it for?"

Right now it looks like super-detailed personal notes, to help you absorb and remember the material. I'm sure it served that purpose well.

If the intended audience is someone else, what's the purpose?

Are you trying to inspire them to read the book? Are you trying to give a qualitative review of the content itself, or the writing? Are you trying to highlight some interesting nuggets from the book which most people would be surprised by or interested in? Some combination of these?

I read it all, and to be blunt it took a lot of effort. That's generally not a good thing for a piece of writing, but again I don't know if you're just sharing your own notes here (which is fine) or if this is intended to be an audience-facing piece, like a blog post.

If it is intended for an audience, and if you'd like me to, I can share more feedback.

--

It did serve as a nice refresher to Sapiens, and reminded me about the needle (not the awl, but the threaded fine-pointed needle) being one of the most important inventions in early human history. I just find that fascinating because I would never have guessed it.

I learned that from one of Brian Fagan's books where he wrote about early clothing tech, and how awls could produce basic cloak-like garments suitable for shielding us from the sun, rain, wind and basically making us more comfortable in frontier conditions. But for real habitat expansion during the ice age, we needed individually tailored & form-fitting clothing to survive, which was only made possible by the development of advanced threaded needles.

Once early humans got good at that, the world was truly our oyster! 🌎