[GUI Plugin] Annotations

[BobC]

Originally Posted by BeckyEbook

The plugin (1.8.3 beta) with tolino reader works great now. Thank you!

When I install the plug-in the Version number shows up as 1.8.2 -where is your 1.8.3 coming from ?

BobC

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by BobC

When I install the plug-in the Version number shows up as 1.8.2 -where is your 1.8.3 coming from ?

BobC

Typo?

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Typo?

My typo. The version number is 1.8.2. But, the release notes have 1.8.3.

[mazi92]

Sorry I am not so good in these things I need a bit of help if anyone is willing.

I installed the plugin and restarted, it seems enabled.

But I can't find how to do this step.

Calibre: Open the Annotations plugin context menu, select Fetch annotations from Amazon Kindle.

I already have taken notes on my kindle for the book. How are you suppose to open the context menu for the plugin? Thanks.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by mazi92

Sorry I am not so good in these things I need a bit of help if anyone is willing.

I installed the plugin and restarted, it seems enabled.

But I can't find how to do this step.

Calibre: Open the Annotations plugin context menu, select Fetch annotations from Amazon Kindle.

I already have taken notes on my kindle for the book. How are you suppose to open the context menu for the plugin? Thanks.

Clicking the button for the plugin will display the menu. If there is a supported device connected, there should be an item to fetch the annotations.

[mazi92]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Clicking the button for the plugin will display the menu. If there is a supported device connected, there should be an item to fetch the annotations.

Ok I figured it out. I didn't know u had to add the plugin in the toolbar I thought it would just appear after installation.

Thanks for the help.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by mazi92

Ok I figured it out. I didn't know u had to add the plugin in the toolbar I thought it would just appear after installation.

During the installation, you should be prompted were to put the button. But, if you skip that, you need to do it yourself.

[GoNico]

Hello! I'm afraid this very basic info may be available somewhere, but I've looked through this thread and the help document for the Annotations plug-in and can't find it.

I don't actually have a Kindle device. I use the Nook. I also use Kindle for Mac, and Kindle on my Android phone. I use Calibre in part to read the Kindle books on the Nook.

Can this Annotations plugin fetch notes/highlighting from my Kindle for Mac, or do I have to have a device physically plugged in for it to fetch from?

When I click on the icon and go to "import annotations from," I'm only given "good reader" as an option.

Thank you!
Nico

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by GoNico

Hello! I'm afraid this very basic info may be available somewhere, but I've looked through this thread and the help document for the Annotations plug-in and can't find it.

I don't actually have a Kindle device. I use the Nook. I also use Kindle for Mac, and Kindle on my Android phone. I use Calibre in part to read the Kindle books on the Nook.

Can this Annotations plugin fetch notes/highlighting from my Kindle for Mac, or do I have to have a device physically plugged in for it to fetch from?

When I click on the icon and go to "import annotations from," I'm only given "good reader" as an option.

Um, did you read the first post? There is a table in it that shows what is supported. It explicitly shows Kindles as a hardware device only.

Support for other devices and applications can be added (I'm in the process of adding support for the tolino devices). But, it needs the annotations to be accessible, understandable and for someone to have the time and skills to do it. I haven't looked at the way the annotations are stored in the Kindle applications, but I suspect they aren't in an easily extractable format.

[GoNico]

Thank you for clarifying! Yes, I did read the first post, and although I'm not totally unfamiliar with computers, I didn't really register or understand the "platform" part of the chart. (I get it now, though.) I saw that "Kindle" was listed as supported and I didn't realize that the application form of Kindle was so different from the hardware device form of Kindle. Now I do!

At this point, despite this useful web site, I will probably just return to doing all my work using physical texts, and just use the e-books for things I don't take notes on. Unfortunately our copyright-loving culture has just made ebooks too difficult.


Thanks for all your good work, though!

[davidfor]

@GoNico: I don't consider the issue with annotation sharing or retrieving a issue with copyrights. It is more an issue of standards. To the best of my knowledge, there is no real standard for how annotations are marked in ebooks or stored for sharing. Each ereading device and application basically does its own thing. Some have ways to export to things like EverNote, for others, it is completely contained.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like something the big companies are interested in fixing, so I can't see anything is likely to change in the near future.

[sweth]

Originally Posted by davidfor

Um, did you read the first post? There is a table in it that shows what is supported. It explicitly shows Kindles as a hardware device only.

Support for other devices and applications can be added (I'm in the process of adding support for the tolino devices). But, it needs the annotations to be accessible, understandable and for someone to have the time and skills to do it. I haven't looked at the way the annotations are stored in the Kindle applications, but I suspect they aren't in an easily extractable format.

FWIW they are actually super-easy to extract, at least for the MacOS version of the Kindle app (and I assume the Windows version uses the same file formats). For a given ebook B12345678_EBOK.azw in the Kindle "My Kindle Content" dir, if there are any highlights or annotations, those are stored in a corresponding B12345678_EBOK.mbp or B12345678_EBOK.mbpV2 file that is easily-parsable JSON:

{
"startPosition" : 11205,
"metadata" : {
"mchl_color" : "orange"
},
"endPosition" : 11335,
"type" : "kindle.highlight"
},
{
"endPosition" : 1536,
"text" : "testing annotation",
"startPosition" : 1519,
"type" : "kindle.note"
},
{
"metadata" : {
"mchl_color" : "yellow"
},
"startPosition" : 1519,
"endPosition" : 1536,
"type" : "kindle.highlight"
},

I no longer use the Kindle app for reading, but when I did, I regularly extracted annotations from those files with no problem.

(Note that those files aren't created/updated until after you close the Kindle app, which caused me no end of confusion when I was first looking at this. Further adding to the confusion is the presence of .phl files for most books, which are XML files that appear to include info about highlights; those, it turns out, are "popular highlights" that other people have made in the same book.)

[richo]

Originally Posted by davidfor

To the best of my knowledge, there is no real standard for how annotations are marked in ebooks or stored for sharing. Each ereading device and application basically does its own thing.

This is exactly the reason I moved to KOReader to read my books. And this app can run on many eInk devices and Android as well. Highlights there are stored simple. There is even sw to get them out easily (KoHighlights). I am keeping my books in calibre.

Now searching for a way to merge koreader higlights using calibre if same book is read on different devices. Or moved to and from same device and re-re-read after some time.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by richo

This is exactly the reason I moved to KOReader to read my books. And this app can run on many eInk devices and Android as well. Highlights there are stored simple. There is even sw to get them out easily (KoHighlights). I am keeping my books in calibre.

Now searching for a way to merge koreader higlights using calibre if same book is read on different devices. Or moved to and from same device and re-re-read after some time.

In that case, I would actually talk to the KOReader developers. If they have an export function for the annotations, they probably have an import, and adding a merge function to that makes sense. Or export and merge would work as well.

For storing the annotations, if they are a file, you can add them to calibre. You might need to tweak the extension so that they don't get treated as a book of some sort. By that I mean if the export produced an HTML file, then calibre has some handling for this and can do things like convert to another format. In this case, you wouldn't want to do that. But, if it has some other extension, calibre will track the file and keep it with the actual book.

This plugin does do some merging of annotations between different devices. But, the annotations are not stored in a way that it is possible to send back to a device and have them used there. If you want to accumulate them to look at, it could be used. But, it needs someone to write the code to read the KOReader annotations. That isn't something I'm currently interested in doing, but if someone wants to do it, I'll be happy to answer any questions and add the code to the plugin.

[richo]

Originally Posted by davidfor

In that case, I would actually talk to the KOReader developers. If they have an export function for the annotations, they probably have an import, and adding a merge function to that makes sense. Or export and merge would work as well.

KOreader creates .sdr subfolder with same name as the book of the folder where book is placed, in that folder there is a file called metadata.epub.lua which in lua data format has metadata about the book reading progress some settings and also highlights. I am attaching the example.

There is python based sw for extracting these information on github called KOHighlights