I exported every Readwise highlight to Markdown last year. Four thousand of them. I have used maybe sixty in actual writing.
The export wasn't the problem. The export was excellent.
Exporting gives you a folder, not a recall path
Readwise exports clean Markdown, organised by book or article. Drop it in Obsidian and you have a library that reads nicely.
But writing happens somewhere else. Word. Google Docs. A CMS. A newsletter editor. There is no wire between that folder and your cursor.
So the real workflow is: you're mid-sentence, you half-remember a line, you switch windows, you can't remember which book, you search a keyword, you scroll three results, you find it, copy, switch back, paste. Then you notice there's no attribution, so you switch back again.
Two minutes per quote. Twenty quotes in a feature piece, that's forty minutes. Most people quit at the third one and write from memory. Which is why the bibliography at the end has nothing you can check.
Three approaches, three costs
Search by hand. The loop above. Fine for two or three quotes, not fine for twenty.
Keep the export in Obsidian and lean on search and backlinks. Better, because the search is full-text and links jump. Two problems persist.
First, provenance. Whether the exported note kept the source URL depends on whether that field had a value when you exported. Dates are worse: Readwise records when *you* read it, not when the piece was published.
Second, granularity. A [[note]] link points at a whole page. Your reader lands on 2,000 words and has to find the sentence themselves.
Have the quote come back to you while you write. This is the approach I ended up building, and it's why Inkory exists. When you highlight, the extension stores the sentence, its page, title, site and publish date locally. While you draft, the writing surface offers the relevant highlights for where your cursor is. One click inserts the quote with the citation attached. When you're done, the reference list generates in GB/T 7714, APA or MLA.
The difference is sequencing. The first two are "write, then go find evidence". The third is "evidence is already next to you".
What to do with the exports you already have
Straight answer: Inkory has no Readwise importer. I'm not shipping a fake one.
But there's a path. Point Inkory at your Obsidian vault (read-only) and the exported notes become searchable from inside the app, tagged with a notebook icon, and clicking one opens it via obsidian://. Nothing is copied, nothing is rewritten.
Read-only vault mounting is free, not a Pro feature.
The caveat matters: notes that came through Readwise usually have incomplete provenance — no URL, no publish date. Insert those into a draft and the citation will be half-formed. If you need a complete citation, highlight the passage again on the original page so the extension can capture the page metadata.
The test that actually matters
You don't need a better export format. You need this: can you pull the sentence that supports what you just wrote within two seconds?
If the answer is no, format improvements won't help. The bottleneck isn't the file. It's the distance between you and the file.
Related: Obsidian clippings you never cite · Zotero and browser highlights don't do the same job