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MachineGunJoe · 12-02-2014, 11:16 AM

Hi,

I´m new to the world of e-reading and I must admit that so far I´ve been pretty frustrated. I did quite some research and experimented with various readers for Windows (Desktop) and Android but so far without success. This thread comes pretty close to what I´m looking for, so I hope it´s ok if I post my questions and thoughts here.

I´m an academic and I travel a lot, therefore I was hunting for a sustainable solution to carry (DRM free) EPUBs and PDFs with me which I can also annotate on different devices. A typical scenario would be: I read and annotate on my Android phone (or possibly an e-reader or tablet which I don´t own yet) and I continue with working on the book/my notes on my laptop or office PC later (therefore syncing annotations from phone to desktop and between different Windows PCs is most important to me).

So far, the closest I got to this scenario on the Android side is Moon+ Reader Pro in combination with Dropbox and DropSync. The latter two let me keep my library in sync which works well so far. Moon+ Reader Pro allows for exporting annotations as plain text without additional information like page numbers etc. My preferred option is to export annotations to Evernote which can then be synchronized with Evernote on my desktop. However, this is not very satisfying as the notes are not tied to the EPUBs/PDFs and I can only find the text sections by performing keyword searches. I also cannot get annotations from my desktop to my phone. Still, this is better than all the other apps I tried.

On the Windows side, I´m torn between BlueFire and Adobe Digitals Editions (ADE) which seem to be the best options so far. The advantage of BlueFire is that one can export annotations in Windows to a TXT-file which can then be used on different platforms (I thought about saving them to Dropbox and/or Evernote). Unfortunately, there´s apparently no feature to re-import annotations into BlueFire. This is what I like about ADE: It automatically saves annotations to .annot files (located in C:\Users\XXX\Documents\My Digital Editions\Annotations) which can also be re-imported. Unfortunately, it´s apparently not possible to move them to Dropbox for automatic synchronization (does anybody know a workaround for that?) and they can´t be opened/integrated on Android.

Does anybody have better solutions? I´m aware that these syncing features can partly be achieved by certain platforms (Google Books, Kindle, Mantano but I´m reluctant to tie myself to a specific platform). Stvn66´s solution seem´s to be only for PDFs not EPUBs.

Any help would be much appreciated. Or we should just initiate a Kickstarter campaign to create our own solution!

12-02-2014, 11:16 AM	#3
MachineGunJoe Junior Member Posts: 6 Karma: 10 Join Date: Dec 2014 Device: Windows PC/Android phone	Also looking for cross platform syncing for annotations... Hi, I´m new to the world of e-reading and I must admit that so far I´ve been pretty frustrated. I did quite some research and experimented with various readers for Windows (Desktop) and Android but so far without success. This thread comes pretty close to what I´m looking for, so I hope it´s ok if I post my questions and thoughts here. I´m an academic and I travel a lot, therefore I was hunting for a sustainable solution to carry (DRM free) EPUBs and PDFs with me which I can also annotate on different devices. A typical scenario would be: I read and annotate on my Android phone (or possibly an e-reader or tablet which I don´t own yet) and I continue with working on the book/my notes on my laptop or office PC later (therefore syncing annotations from phone to desktop and between different Windows PCs is most important to me). So far, the closest I got to this scenario on the Android side is Moon+ Reader Pro in combination with Dropbox and DropSync. The latter two let me keep my library in sync which works well so far. Moon+ Reader Pro allows for exporting annotations as plain text without additional information like page numbers etc. My preferred option is to export annotations to Evernote which can then be synchronized with Evernote on my desktop. However, this is not very satisfying as the notes are not tied to the EPUBs/PDFs and I can only find the text sections by performing keyword searches. I also cannot get annotations from my desktop to my phone. Still, this is better than all the other apps I tried. On the Windows side, I´m torn between BlueFire and Adobe Digitals Editions (ADE) which seem to be the best options so far. The advantage of BlueFire is that one can export annotations in Windows to a TXT-file which can then be used on different platforms (I thought about saving them to Dropbox and/or Evernote). Unfortunately, there´s apparently no feature to re-import annotations into BlueFire. This is what I like about ADE: It automatically saves annotations to .annot files (located in C:\Users\XXX\Documents\My Digital Editions\Annotations) which can also be re-imported. Unfortunately, it´s apparently not possible to move them to Dropbox for automatic synchronization (does anybody know a workaround for that?) and they can´t be opened/integrated on Android. Does anybody have better solutions? I´m aware that these syncing features can partly be achieved by certain platforms (Google Books, Kindle, Mantano but I´m reluctant to tie myself to a specific platform). Stvn66´s solution seem´s to be only for PDFs not EPUBs. Any help would be much appreciated. Or we should just initiate a Kickstarter campaign to create our own solution!