Glo Remove all annotations

[Vanguard3000]

Hi, all.

I tend to make a lot of highlights and annotations as I read, to mark typos or poorly formatted parts of the book. Depending on the quality of the ebook, I might end up with 10+ pages of highlights by the time I get around to fixing them in Sigil, and its a real pain to have to remove them afterward one by one.

I've also noticed that I can remove a book from my Kobo, and when it is re-added to my library after fixing, the highlights and annotations will still be listed, even if the highlighted block of text no longer exists! I assume the kobo simply remembers a position in the ebook and saves the text to the annotation list, but I don't know where it is this information is saved.

Is there a file on the Kobo that stores the annotations and highlights, that I can remove or edit to quickly get rid of all (or as many as I'd like) highliughts and annotations for a book?

Also, out of curiosity, how are the annotations ordered in the ebook? I find that if I remove one highlight within the ebook, the rest will "shuffle" seemingly at random. I would have thought they'd be ordered as they appear in the book, or by date of the highlight, but it doesn't seem that way.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Sharkus]

I'm not aware of a feature in any of the devices / apps that allows you to delete all annotations. I can say for certain the iOS app does not have this and you need to delete them one by one manually.

Annotations are one of the items that are synced, which is why when you delete and add the book in they are still there.

On an eReader I'd assume the data is in the database, and could possibly be edited, but I'm unsure wether those changes would be synced back up to the server, ie; removing the information during the sync. Thus editing the database would be ok until you next sync, then it downloads the info from the server.

For the ordering question, not sure how it's done on the eReaders, but on iOS if you delete an annotation then the rest do remain in the correct order, which is by chapter.

I hope that helps.

[GeoffR]

For sideloaded epubs there is a file for each opened book in the Digital Editions/Annotations directory which stays on the device after the book is deleted. I don't know much about it as I don't make annotations, but I think to completely remove all traces of a book after it is deleted you would also need to delete all files under the Digital Editions/Annotations and Digital Editions/Manifest directories that have the same base name as the deleted .epub.

[Ripplinger]

One settings to remove all annotations would be great since when you delete a book, it leaves all the annotations, even if you ever just bookmarked a page.

What I do is periodically check the annotations and manually delete books I've already deleted when I'm adding new books or charging the Glo.

[Vanguard3000]

I should specify that I am using sideloaded epubs as opposed to those synched from Kobo Desktop (or Calibre).

Thanks for your replies so far. I've checked the annotations folder, and it does have a file which displays the annotations when opened in Wordpad. However, after deleting the file (and its same-named file in the "Manifest" folder) when i open the book on the ereader, the annotations are still there.

I've looked through the folder structure of the ereader, and found many empty "junk" folders, but nothing that could hold additional annotation info. Is it possible the information could be stored in some inaccessible area of the ereader's drive (like the "root" folder of an unrooted phone)?

[GeoffR]

Originally Posted by Vanguard3000

Thanks for your replies so far. I've checked the annotations folder, and it does have a file which displays the annotations when opened in Wordpad. However, after deleting the file (and its same-named file in the "Manifest" folder) when i open the book on the ereader, the annotations are still there.

My understanding is that the annotations are stored in the device's database as well as in the Digital Editions/Annotations directory, so to completely remove the anotations you need to either delete the book from the device or delete the annotations individually from within the book, as well as deleting the relevant file in the Annotations directory. I.e. if the book is still on the device then the annotations will be loaded from the database even if the file in the Annotations directory is missing.

[davidfor]

As the others have said, there is no way on the device to remove all the annotations for a book in one go. My practice when doing what you are doing is to remove them as I fix the problem. And in case you don't know, if you press on the highlight in the book, the menu will have a "Delete note" option to remove it.

As to ways to work around this, the annotations are stored in two places. For all books, they are stored in the database table "Bookmarks". For epubs and PDFs on the main memory, they are also in an annotations file.

For purchased kepubs, as Sharkus said, the annotations are synced to the server. I don't think I have ever looked at what happened when I deleted one of these, but my guess would be the annotations would stay on the device until the next sync. Then they would be removed.

For epubs on the SD card, the annotations are only in the database. Deleting the rows from the database will remove the annotations. Doing this doesn't update the tile that shows how many annotations there are for the book. These counts are stored in a way I wouldn't fiddle with. Opening and closing the book will fix them

For epubs on the main memory, it is a bit trickier. With older firmware, if the annotations file exists, the contents will replace the the annotations in the Bookmarks table. With the current firmware, it seems to merge them. A very quick tests seems to show if the annotation is in the table but not in the file, it removes the annotation. If it is in both, it uses whichever has the latest timestamp. The latter is only really used if you change or delete an annotation when opening the annotations list from the home screen.

For epubs on the main memory, I will delete the annotations file as reading them causes some problems. The annotations are fine, but the list doesn't show them in the correct chapters. But, clearing the annotations out of the file would mean the next time the epub is opened, the annotations would be removed. The following is an example of a file with no annotations.

<annotationSet xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/digitaleditions/annotations">
  <publication>
    <dc:identifier></dc:identifier>
    <dc:title>Summer Knight</dc:title>
    <dc:creator>Jim Butcher</dc:creator>
    <dc:publisher></dc:publisher>
  </publication>
</annotationSet>

If there are annotations, they will be wrapped in "<annotation>" "</annotation>" tags. Removing these will remove the annotation when the book is opened.

The annotations returning after deleting a sideloaded book is because the annotations file is not deleted.

[Vanguard3000]

I've deleted all of the .annot filles in the annotations folder. Are you saying there's another copy of this file in the Kobo's firmware? is there any way to access this?

[davidfor]

There is a copy in the internal database. It is an SQLite database and is in ".kobo/KoboReader.sqlite". The table of interest is called "Bookmark". Deleting all the rows in the table plus deleting the annotations files will remove all the annotations on the device.

A little bit better would be to set the value of the column "Hidden" to "true". When the book is next opened, the annotations will be removed from the file and the database. And if you are reading purchased kepubs, they will be deleted at the next sync.

[Vanguard3000]

Booyah. Worked like a dream. Thanks, everyone for your help. This will speed up my OCD-fuelled epub editing quite a bit.