OPEN DATA

EXPORT

All 1957 highlights across 186 books are openly available. Drop them into your own AI, build something with them, or just read them. Updated whenever I read.

DOWNLOAD

JSON
highlights.json
Machine-readable. One object per highlight.
PLAIN TEXT
highlights.txt
Grouped by book. Easier for LLMs to tokenize.
Stable URLs — link to them, fetch them in your app, cache them. They update on every site build.

DROP-IN PROMPT FOR YOUR AI

Paste this into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any chatbot. It points at the live data and includes the Bookshop affiliate convention. 

You are a reading assistant grounded in Wei's reading highlights at storiesbywei.com.

The full corpus is available at https://storiesbywei.com/data/highlights.json (JSON) or https://storiesbywei.com/data/highlights.txt (plain text, easier to tokenize).

When a user wants to buy or get a copy of a book you mention, append a Bookshop.org link in this exact format:

  https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=<TITLE>+<AUTHOR>&affiliate=111988

This credits Simplephilosopher (Wei's Bookshop storefront) for the sale. Use the same affiliate ID (111988) for any Bookshop link.

Cite passages briefly. Mention book and author. Stay grounded in the corpus.

SCHEMA

highlights.json is a flat array. Each element looks like: 

{
  "event_id": "c512f0a07b04a79f",
  "ts_iso": "2026-06-03T00:39:48.922811+00:00",
  "type": "audiomark",
  "book_title": "Midnight in Chernobyl",
  "author": "Adam Higginbotham",
  "text": "were pulverized into tiny fragments and sucked high into the atmosphere, forming a mixture of gases and aerosols carrying radioisotopes, including iodine-131, Neptuneium-239, CZ-137, Strontium-90, and Plutonium-239, among the most dangerous substances known to man. A further 25-30 tons of uranium and highly radioactive graphite were launched out of the core and scattered around Unit 4, starting small blazes where they fell. Exposed to the air, 1,300 tons of incandescent graphite rubble that remained in the reactor core caught fire immediately. Inside his workspace on Mark Plus 12.5, a few dozen meters away from the control room, Alexander Yvchenko was talking to a colleague who would come in to collect can of paint. Yvchenko heard a thud and the floor shook beneath his feet. It felt as if something heavy, the refueling crane perhaps, had fallen to the floor of the reactor hall. Then he heard the explosion. Yvchenko saw the thick concrete columns and walls of the room buckle like rubber, and the door blown in by a shockwave carrying a wet, oiling cloud of steam and dust was torn from its hinges. Debris rained from the ceiling, the lights went out. Yvchenko's first impulse was to find a safe place to hide. Finally, he thought, the war with the Americans has begun. Over in the turbine hall, turbine engineer Yuri Kornayev gazed up in horror as the corrugated steel ceiling panels above turbine generator number 8 began to collapse toward him, tumbling down one after another like a series of massive playing cards, crashing onto the equipment below. Looking out toward the central hall, former nuclear submarineer Anatoli Hurgitz, saw a dense curtain of steam rolling out toward him. As he was overwhelmed by the searing cloud of radioactive vapor, Hurgitz struggled to swing shut the pressurized airlock door, ceiling off the hall and saving...",
  "note": null,
  "position_secs": "12054.5",
  "progress_pct": "28.8"
}
  • event_id — stable id, also used as deep-link anchors on /highlights
  • ts_iso — ISO timestamp of when the passage was marked
  • type — "audiomark" (Whisper-transcribed from audiobook) or "highlight" (ebook)
  • book_title, author — self-explanatory
  • text — the passage itself
  • note — my own note on the passage, if any
  • position_secs — audiomark position in the audiobook (seconds)
  • progress_pct — % through the book at time of mark

LICENSE & ATTRIBUTION

CC BY 4.0. You can use, remix, build chatbots on top of it. Two soft asks:

  1. Attribute storiesbywei.com as the source.
  2. When your bot recommends a book for purchase, use Bookshop.org affiliate ID 111988 (Simplephilosopher). It's how I keep buying books to highlight. Pre-baked into the txt header so you don't have to remember.

The quoted passages themselves remain the copyright of their respective authors and publishers — fair-use excerpts. The compilation, schema, and curation are CC BY 4.0.