I don't like sounding bitter, but honestly I am. The current experience of highlighting text, adding notes, and most importantly exporting them is so unreliable and unfriendly that it discourages me from reading the books I want. For me, half the process of reading a book is about keeping notes on what I'm reading.
- Newly highlighted text is not saved
- Existing highlighted text is removed inexplicably from whole books (I've lost annotations from two finished books by now)
- Exporting annotations is a laborious and per-book process, requiring access to a PC
- Exported annotations are in an unstructured format, with minimum additional data (chapters, dates etc)
- Comments, requests and bug reports go unanswered by Kobo (in this forum, in GitHub and in Kobo's support channels). We're left trying to figure out things on our own and come up with hacky workarounds.
As it stands, I'm trying to find a way to take photos of my Forma's screen and OCRing them on my phone. To me it feels possibly more reliable than how things are currently supposed to work.
I've tried using
@davidfor's excellent
Annotations plugin via Calibre and it was great while it worked. Alas, at some point, something, somewhere went wrong and the process broke irreparably. I thought I'd be better off keeping it as simple as possible, avoiding any and all dependencies in my process. Still, not even the simplest, on-device workflows are reliable.
I only wish some of this frustration reaches someone at Kobo and they decide to do something about it.