Troubleshooting Extensive highlighting & note-taking

[Pipes]

I am thinking about purchasing a Kindle 3 but wanted to inquire about its ability to handle a high quantity of highlighting and note-taking.

My experience with the Sony PRS-900 (Daily Edition) has been disappointing. I currently have 60 books (mostly PDFs) and over 700 notes on my Sony reader (the notes are mostly highlighted sections about 2-3 sentences long). After reading and highlighting the first few books/pdfs, I noticed a lag of several seconds while the reader "processed" the note. This lag has gotten progressively longer, forcing me to become increasingly selective with highlighting. It now takes about 3-4 minutes for each note to process! The delay obviously makes highlighting while I read impractical.

I am looking for a reader that can handle extensive highlighting. Can anyone confirm that the Kindle 2 or DX (and, by extension, the soon-to-be-released Kindle 3) is suitable for this? Thanks.

[trekchick]

As far as PDF performance with highlighting and note-taking - no one knows. These are new features for PDF on Kindle 3, which hasn't yet begun to ship. I can tell you that adding 60 bookmarks to a single PDF doesn't create a noticeable delay. I use a lot of bookmarks because Kindle doesn't support PDF links, including those in the table of contents. Another thing to consider is PDF reflow. If you're accustomed to resizing PDF text on your 900, you will miss that functionality on the Kindle 3.

It is rumored that Kindle DX Graphite will soon incorporate the same PDF functionality as the new Kindle 3. If this comes about, then DX would make a much better choice for PDF reading, since the screen size allows you to easily read PDFs without needing to enlarge the text.

[catsittingstill]

Obviously I haven't highlighted or taken notes on pdfs on my Kindle, as that function won't be available until the K3 comes out.

I have taken really extensive highlights and notes on some of my mobi books (.azw format) however and have not noticed any slowdowns in processing. But by really extensive I mean roughly a hundred and thirty notes in a single book. I don't think I approach your total number of notes. I might have 200 or so but not more than that, I should think.

I hope this was helpful.

[susan_cassidy]

Most books have a limit on how much you can highlight, for the Kindle, at least. This is, I believe, because of "fair use" restrictions. A copy of your highlights is made in "My Clippings", so that you can edit it, copy it to other files, etc. Publishers don't want to allow unlimited cut and paste of pieces of the book.

Public domain stuff doesn't have a limit, I think.

[AGB]

Originally Posted by susan_cassidy

Most books have a limit on how much you can highlight, for the Kindle, at least. This is, I believe, because of "fair use" restrictions. A copy of your highlights is made in "My Clippings", so that you can edit it, copy it to other files, etc. Publishers don't want to allow unlimited cut and paste of pieces of the book.

I don't get that sort of thinking. So, instead of hammering down on people actually publishing "too much", let's make everyone a criminal, before they even consider it.

So, in reality, if you have a subscription to a magazine or newspaper, and you find a note you want to copy/paste, you can only copy, say, 60 percent of it? That note is copyrighted too. Or if you want to collect articles about a given subject, then that has to be impossible as well, assuming they do it consequently on all copyrighted material.

It's like saying in the physical world, that you're not allowed to make clippings of full articles, only parts thereof. Where as I understand it, the law deals with the actual publishing of "too much".
This is what you get when you have lawmakers making it illegal to even circumvent the DRM even if you're not otherwise doing anything illegal.

[trekchick]

Originally Posted by AGB

So, in reality, if you have a subscription to a magazine or newspaper, and you find a note you want to copy/paste, you can only copy, say, 60 percent of it?

More like 10% of it. You can still highlight text within the book, but it will put a clipping limit message in your "My Clippings.txt" file instead of copying the highlighted text. It's worth noting that the clipping limit is a separate function from DRM (i.e. simply removing DRM doesn't change the clipping limit).

[AGB]

Damn that sounds as an idiotic limitation for no real reason but fear of your customers' acts and intentions.

"A hack, a hack! My reader for a hack!", to paraphrase some bloke who apparently really needed a horse.

[TomF]

Originally Posted by AGB

It's like saying in the physical world, that you're not allowed to make clippings of full articles, only parts thereof.

But this isn't in the physical world so you can't use the physical world as an example. You're comparing apples and oranges. Digital media and printed media are two different things and they have different characteristics. I really don't understand why people keep doing this because it's pointless.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Pipes

I am thinking about purchasing a Kindle 3 but wanted to inquire about its ability to handle a high quantity of highlighting and note-taking.

My experience with the Sony PRS-900 (Daily Edition) has been disappointing. I currently have 60 books (mostly PDFs) and over 700 notes on my Sony reader (the notes are mostly highlighted sections about 2-3 sentences long). After reading and highlighting the first few books/pdfs, I noticed a lag of several seconds while the reader "processed" the note. This lag has gotten progressively longer, forcing me to become increasingly selective with highlighting. It now takes about 3-4 minutes for each note to process! The delay obviously makes highlighting while I read impractical.

I am looking for a reader that can handle extensive highlighting. Can anyone confirm that the Kindle 2 or DX (and, by extension, the soon-to-be-released Kindle 3) is suitable for this? Thanks.

I can't answer the performance issue as I have never really timed them myself. However I have the K2 and I highlight a lot. I've highlighted pages at a time, added my own notes and have not had an issue.

I don't believe you'll notice a performance hit on the Kindle. The reason you notice it on the SONY and not the Kindle is because the sony stores all Annotations, bookmarks, and notes in an XML (text ) file. This file is accessed by all of the books, so the more you annotate the more you impact all of your books performance.

The kindle creates one binary file with an extension "mdp" for each book and stores specific book annotations, bookmarks, highlights for each file.
This keeps the files smaller and makes it faster to access all of the annotations; in addition to the fact that binary files have a faster access time.


The "limit" the other poster has mentioned is specifically the clippings, which is not the same as viewing your annotations, highlights, and bookmarks.

The clippings is shared text file for all you books, and it stores all your highlights in a text file called myclippings.txt. It is designed to allow you to easily copy the content of your highlights in case you wish to quote a book. For copyright reasons they limit the amount you can clip.

=X=

[AGB]

Originally Posted by TomF

But this isn't in the physical world so you can't use the physical world as an example. You're comparing apples and oranges. Digital media and printed media are two different things and they have different characteristics. I really don't understand why people keep doing this because it's pointless.

I'm doing that, because here in Denmark, copyrights wrt written stuff are the same, whether its digital or analogue. So, yeah, I'm comparing apples to apples.