Mobileread member "vinicius0881" recently asked me to further explore the possibility of retrieving some highlights made on the ebookwise ETI-2 (that he had just ordered and was 'hoping' to be able to do this!).
I was intrigued by his request as I had always wanted to know if this could be done, but never had any reason to pursue this further. Thanks for his request, as this turned out to be relatively easy to do i.e. retrieve all markups/annotations (drawing/scribbles and highlites) from the external storage card. (SmartMedia for EBW 1150 or CompactFlash for REB 1200). On the iLiad this feature is handled by a Scribble Merger. On the 1150/1200, it must be done manually (for now)!
What is required:1. External card reader i.e. SM card reader for 1150 or CF card reader for 1200.
2. Determine the .RES name associated with your .imp. Many .imp files are renamed after being created to be more descriptive, however, the .RES directory name originally used must be known. You may wish to
unimp.exe the .imp to see that directory name that is extracted or use a hex/binary editor to view the .imp and look for a name ending in .RES at the top. Once known, the .RES directory name will be the directory to retrieve from the external card.
3. After drawing/scribbling/highlighting the ebook on the ebookwise, turn off the unit. Remove the external card and place it in your PC card reader. EBW 1150 owners are advised to "cycle on-off" their ebook reader to avoid memory card corruption
(see IMP for further details).
4. Navigate to the external card reader's drive letter and in the 'ebooks' directory therein, look for the .RES directory name determined in step 2 above.
5. Copy that .RES directory to your hard drive, where you want the newly marked-up .imp to be stored.
6. Using
sbtest.exe, reimp that .RES directory by launching the 'sbtest.exe' program and navigating to the .RES directory stored on your hard drive in step 5. Double-click that .RES directory name and notice that the 'ReImp!' button is now activated. Click the 'ReImp!' button and your (markup) .imp will be created.
7. Now view your markup .imp in the PC imp viewer and (optionally) print it to a .pdf driver (like the free PrimoPDF from
www.primopdf.com).
As a test, I used a REB 1200 .imp file I had converted from .prc (Mobipocket - Orwell Animal Farm_1200.imp) and marked up. On the first page, I drew/scribbled, on page two, I only used highlights (one continuous one and nine individual word ones) and lastly on page three, I drew (not too well!) some annotations. These markups were printed out (first 4 pages only) to a pdf file for easy transporting/printing. I also ran the before and after .imp through imp_dump.pl to see the differences and their output.txt are attached below. It turns out that the marked-up .imp has, 4 new filetypes in the .RES folder i.e
BTok, Ano2, MRPs and Hlts. An additional file,
BPos, records the page the ebook was on when it was closed!
FYI, the page one and page three annotations are stored in PICT image format
as .png of size 158x51 and 105x140 respectively whereas the page two highlites are stored as a start and stop position for each of the 10 highlights made.
As of yet, the ebookwise's external card cannot be accessed by the PC when connected via the usb cable, otherwise this could be done from the PC if the external card would show up as a drive letter on the PC. Oh well, anybody have any insights here?