Read Book

by coreyhaines31

Read Book is a Writing skill for Claude Code, published by coreyhaines31 in makerskills.

680 stars55 forkson coreyhaines31/makerskillsAdded 2026/08/24+2% in starsRepository updated 2026/08/18

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agent-skillsai-agentsclaude-codeclaude-skillspersonal-knowledge-managementproductivity

Install in seconds

Install Read Book

Copy Read Book into your Claude Code skills folder. Run the command in your terminal, or review the source on GitHub before installing.

terminal

npx degit https://github.com/coreyhaines31/makerskills/tree/main/skills/read-book ~/.claude/skills/read-book

Requires Node.js. Downloads this skill only — not the rest of the repository — into your Claude Code skills folder.

Without Node.js

git clone https://github.com/coreyhaines31/makerskills.git

Clones the whole repository, then copy the skill’s own directory into your skills folder yourself.

In this catalog

Source file: skills/read-book/SKILL.md in coreyhaines31/makerskills
Installs to: ~/.claude/skills/read-book
Collection: One of 20 skills cataloged from this repository
Category: Writing — 1012 skills

What Read Book does

Read Book extracts structured notes, quotes, summaries, and study cards from PDFs, EPUBs, text files, pasted text, or public-domain URLs. Use it to read long books in chunks and optionally save the result to a second-brain highlights file.

Read Book is cataloged under Writing on DirSkills. Read Book comes from a repository tagged agent-skills, ai-agents, claude-code, claude-skills and personal-knowledge-management.

Documentation

README

Excerpt

/read-book — Extract structured notes from books and long PDFs

Sibling to watch-video. Same content-consumption pattern: ingest → chunk → extract → optionally capture to second-brain.

Step 1 — Parse input

Accept:

PDF: file path (Claude reads PDFs natively in chunks via Read pages:"X-Y")
EPUB / MOBI: file path (needs pandoc or ebook-convert to extract — see references/sources.md)
Markdown / .txt: file path (read directly)
Pasted text: just use what was pasted
URL to public-domain text: WebFetch (Project Gutenberg, archive.org, etc.)

Detect type from file extension. If ambiguous, ask.

Step 2 — Parse mode

This is the opening of the README. Read the full README on GitHub.

Commands Read Book provides

Slash commands named in this skill’s SKILL.md, listed in the order they first appear.

/read-book
/sb

Frequently asked about Read Book

What else does coreyhaines31 publish alongside Read Book?
Read Book is one of 20 skills that DirSkills catalogs from coreyhaines31/makerskills, the repository it ships in. Its siblings there include Business Brainstorm, Company Brain and Company CFO. Each one is a separate skill with its own page in this directory, installs the same way Read Book does, and is maintained by coreyhaines31 in that same repository. The rest of the collection is listed on the coreyhaines31/makerskills page.
How does Read Book compare to other Writing skills?
Read Book ranks #618 by stars among the 1012 Writing skills in this catalog. The most-starred ones next to it are Article Writing, Social Media Content Calendar and Knowledge Comic Creator. DirSkills ranks by the star count of the repository each skill ships in, so that order reflects how popular those repositories are rather than any review of Read Book against them. Open each page to compare what they document and how they install.