Highlighting Question

[el.astrologo]

Hi folks, hope you are all doing fine...

I don't have my PRS 700 yet (hopefully I will someday) but a thought occurs to me. I plan on using the reader for college texts and books of that sort so I'm thinking highlighting will be done heavily on my watch.

I was wondering, how does the reader saves text you highlighted? I mean, does it marks it somewhere?

I'm interested because if perhaps it adds some string or something like that in the ebook or some place else, then maybe one could devise a script that could copy all highlighted text to a file and thus getting a summary.

Am I making any sense here? I'm currently studying for a test and haven't slept in almost a day so I beg your indulgence if my english gets sloppy

Anyways.. cheers guys

[Bierkonig]

My experience with highlighting longer texts has been a disaster -- once you put in 80 or so highlights or notes the reader gets really really really slow. I think that Sony knows this and hopefully will address it with firmware.

The highlighting is saved to an annotation file that marks the beginning and ending characters of each highlight. It may be difficult to extract the highlights, but someone here could possibly be talked into figuring out how to do it.

[el.astrologo]

That's too bad I would definitively enjoy being able to highlight as heavily as I want to.

Perhaps this would be addressed in the next firmware update or something.

[Zzz]

I looked at a 700 the other day, and I really liked that when I put a PDF on its SD card, it changed the display and reflow when changing font size and orientation. The highlighting and annotation functions are why I am considering the 700. It looks like the notes can be transferred to and viewed on the computer used for syncing, but I don't know how you get the notes out of the syncing software.

I emailed Sony Support about it. The first response:

Thank you for contacting Sony Support.

I'm glad to provide the information on transferring the notes you made in the Sony Reader to the computer. You can make notes in both the Reader and in the eBook Library software. When you copy a book from eBook Library to the Reader or vice versa the older notes will be replaced with the newer notes.

The follow-up response:

Thank you for contacting Sony Support.

I'm really sorry, but the notes cannot be printed. You can access the all the notes in the Reader from the "All Notes" in Home menu of the Reader. The All Notes list includes all the Notes of all the books stored on the Reader and memory cards.

So now I am waiting to see what new features, if any, the Kindle will have in the new version. Like native PDF support, for a start.

[Andybaby]

if you Must Annonate an Ebook. there is seriously no better solution than a Laptop or Tablet, Ebook readers seriously are just for reading. the 700s notes section is just ment for small little notes on the text and bookmarking, You cant even view just the notes for a single book i believe.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

if you Must Annonate an Ebook. there is seriously no better solution than a Laptop or Tablet, Ebook readers seriously are just for reading. the 700s notes section is just ment for small little notes on the text and bookmarking, You cant even view just the notes for a single book i believe.

Many people have said that the annotation facilities of the Kindle work well. Do you disagree with this?

[Andybaby]

the kindle has its flaws in annotation, it depends on your Level, and how you are using it.

all things being Digital, a tablet can get closer to feeling like the annotation of a paper book alot more closely than an Ebook Reader. the the Perks, Like Searchable notes/text make a tablet better than Paper

[el.astrologo]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

the kindle has its flaws in annotation, it depends on your Level, and how you are using it.

all things being Digital, a tablet can get closer to feeling like the annotation of a paper book alot more closely than an Ebook Reader. the the Perks, Like Searchable notes/text make a tablet better than Paper

True... however a tablet can be twice as expensive as a reader and still has TFT screen which is nasty to the eyes

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

the 700s notes section is just ment for small little notes on the text and bookmarking, You cant even view just the notes for a single book i believe.

yes you can, from the notes menu inside the book (options > notes). from the home screen you have access to all the notes from all book.

[Andybaby]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

yes you can, from the notes menu inside the book (options > notes). from the home screen you have access to all the notes from all book.

ahh. expected it to be that simple. its not a feature I use so i never went looking.

the only time i could see myself annotating a book is for school, and since i would be doing other things, Like writing a paper at the time, i would be in front of a laptop anyway. anyway. I will see in the Fall when i start school how i end up working through this kind of stuff.

[Johnny Cakes]

Originally Posted by Andybaby

if you Must Annonate an Ebook. there is seriously no better solution than a Laptop or Tablet, Ebook readers seriously are just for reading. the 700s notes section is just ment for small little notes on the text and bookmarking, You cant even view just the notes for a single book i believe.

I purchased the PRS700 due to its highlighting features which I obviously did not understand. I was taken with the PRS700's ability to highlight by just tapping the screen, but the inability to print out the highlights or even have them displayed in full form is a non-starter. My bad.

I am using this with court transcripts. I need to highlight a key phrase or two from every page and create a digest.

Could a tablet do what I need? Suggestions?

[el.astrologo]

I suppose a tablet will definitively do what you need and I think so would Kindle 2 (I think I remember reading about it being able to export notes, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong)

[ulugeyik]

"The highlighting is saved to an annotation file that marks the beginning and ending characters of each highlight. It may be difficult to extract the highlights, but someone here could possibly be talked into figuring out how to do it."

That is interesting. What is the filename and how does the format look like? This must be doable atleast with simpler formats.

Regarding tablets and highlighting, yes, they certainly can do that. I have been using a UMPC (Samsung Q1 Ultra) for long time to do that. There are commercial and free software (I have used for windows/multi-OS "jarnal" and for linux "xournal") that let you do such work. Some are more complex and capable than others. However, as was pointed out earlier, they tend to be bulkier, more energy consuming and harder to the eyes. They tend to be more expensive and I think their capabilities in general are an overkill for this purpose.

I was given a PRS 700 as a gift so I can read/annotate pdf files along with ebooks. It is unfortunate that the annotations do not appear to be exportable so far. It makes it quite useless for me.

[Zzz]

As far as portable tablets go, I am waiting on the Asus Eee PC T101H, but I have no idea when it will be out. The Gigabyte M912 tablet is already available, but I haven't had a chance to try one out. There's also the Lenovo Thinkpad X61t and X200t as well, but they're a bit bigger.

I will try the new Kindle and see if it will be an adequate substitute for a while. I think the notes are stored in a text file, so they should be able to be transferred to another computer.

[Andybaby]