Touch Can you take notes on an e-Book Reader?

[BrainDead]

Was thinking of buying the Kobo Touch reader but since I often write notes on bits of paper to remind me of things, I though it might be useful to be able to do this on an eReader instead. I know there is an app called AK Notepad for the Kobo Vox (which runs Android) but I have ruled this out due to the bad reviews and particularly the poor battery life.

It seems that if you want decent batterly life (essential for an e-Book Reader) then you have to go for on with an mono eInk screen rather than a TFT. So is there a notepad app for the Kobo Touch that would allow me to write and save simple plain text notes? I understand the device runs on Linux so there is presumably some app that can be uploaded to it?

PS, is it also true that the Kobo Touch as a hiden built-in Sudoku game?

[JD Gumby]

The Sudoku is no longer hidden, being in the Extras menu now.

As for note-taking, it only lets you add notes to phrases you highlight in a book and you can call up all of your annotations for that book via a menu option while the book is open. There is no general note-taking ability, however, outside of books.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by JD Gumby

...
As for note-taking, it only lets you add notes to phrases you highlight in a book and you can call up all of your annotations for that book via a menu option while the book is open. There is no general note-taking ability, however, outside of books.

... which means that if you create an special ebook for the purpose you can use it as your note taking "app". Simply create a book containing:

"Note 1

Note 2

Note 3 ..."

Then just open the book, highlight an available phrase and enter your note.

[FJames]

That's a good idea. I guess you could hand-write your notes in the Sketch app as well.

Personally I find the keyboard on the KT too slow and too small to be practical for note-taking. I can type fast enough on my 10" HP TouchPad and my 3.5" iPod Touch with capacitive touch screens, but typing on the KT is a bit slow and frustrating, with a high error rate. For occasional use it's fine, but it's just not a note-taking device.

[The Terminator]

Originally Posted by FJames

That's a good idea. I guess you could hand-write your notes in the Sketch app as well.

Personally I find the keyboard on the KT too slow and too small to be practical for note-taking. I can type fast enough on my 10" HP TouchPad and my 3.5" iPod Touch with capacitive touch screens, but typing on the KT is a bit slow and frustrating, with a high error rate. For occasional use it's fine, but it's just not a note-taking device.

I find typing on the KT very fast, the keyboard is just the right size to use both your thumbs for typing.

[pj123]

Is there any way to export the notes?

[TheBard]

Originally Posted by pj123

Is there any way to export the notes?

Assuming you are writing your notes into an epub file, you can transfer that file to your computer, in a similar fashion you used when you transferred the original (almost blank) epub file to the Kobo

[pj123]

TheBard: Thank you. What about notes on PDF files? Can the notes also be exported?

[Xennex1170]

Originally Posted by TheBard

Assuming you are writing your notes into an epub file, you can transfer that file to your computer, in a similar fashion you used when you transferred the original (almost blank) epub file to the Kobo

I wasn't aware you could add/delete anything from an epub file within the KT. :P Learn something everyday..

[Xennex1170]

Originally Posted by pj123

Is there any way to export the notes?

Assuming you are using the included sketch app you can export the resulting PNG file by simply connecting your KT to your computer and copying the file.

[FJames]

Originally Posted by The Terminator

I find typing on the KT very fast, the keyboard is just the right size to use both your thumbs for typing.

It's all relative. The KT takes a firmer touch than a capacitive touch screen, it's a little less accurate, and most importantly it only reacts about half as fast. You can get used to it, but it will never be as fast, and it's hard to go back and forth between the KT and tablets with capacitive touch screens because your typing rhythm is thrown off. If you are typing occasional brief notes like "look up this ref" it's probably fine, but not if you're trying to take class notes and keep up with a lecture.

[PeterT]

I also think that Calibre has support for importing annotations but I don't remember how.

[TheBard]

Originally Posted by pj123

TheBard: Thank you. What about notes on PDF files? Can the notes also be exported?

Sorry, I have not tried making annotations on Kobo PDF files.

[JD Gumby]

Originally Posted by Xennex1170

I wasn't aware you could add/delete anything from an epub file within the KT. :P Learn something everyday..

You can't. The suggestion was building a special epub to use as a notes file - a bunch of random lines or words you could use as placeholders purely so you can use the annotations feature to keep notes.

[davidfor]

As has been mentioned, you can attach notes to highlighted text in epub and kepubs. You can't do this for PDFs. I don't ind the keyboard to hard to use, but I have at most put about 20 characters in the note.

Unfortunately, there isn't a good way to get them off the KT. For kepubs, the Kobo desktop application will retrieve them. Put it has no ability to print or extract them elsewhere. For epubs, Calibre has an experimental option to retrieve the notes to the comments field. While this works, I don't find it very practical.