The highlight function on Kobo devices

[RobertJSawyer]

I'm reading the (excellent) book CONSCIENCE: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION, a Kepub bought directly on my Kobo Glo and downloaded via Wi-Fi directly to the device. It stopped recording highlights on the second highlight I'd made in the book. This feature is so broken for me as to be useless, and, as one who reads tons of nonfiction for research, it's one of the features I need the most. I wish Kobo would fix this.

[Heath Watts]

Originally Posted by flyingtoad

The "Highlight" function works erratically on my Kobo Aura [software 2.5.2] :

For instance, books bought from Kobo and directly downloaded on the reader, let you make highlights more easily than epubs sideloaded from calibre [extended kobo plugin activated].

-- Particularly, Kobo ebooks allow highlighting a word or group of words, in the first twenty pages of the book, and thereafter, the function does not work any more.
Strangely, if I go back to page 1, or 2 of the Kobo ebook, I can highlight any word in a paragraph, but not if I then jump forward to page 100.

-- As for sideloaded epubs added to the Aura from calibre, I hardly manage to make one or two highlight on page 1, and that is all I can do.

How the highlight function works for you, please ? Am I missing something about the proper way to make highlights ? I should be most grateful for your help.

Thank you.

Eight years later, Kobo has still not fixed this problem. I like my Kobo, but I am very unhappy that I cannot see my highlights on my Kobo's screen. I chatted with one of their customer service representatives, and they acted like I was the first person to encounter this problem. Amazon Kindles can highlight text in .mobi files with no problems. It cannot be that difficult for Kobo to fix the highlighting problem that their devices have.

[mathil]

Originally Posted by Heath Watts

Eight years later, Kobo has still not fixed this problem. I like my Kobo, but I am very unhappy that I cannot see my highlights on my Kobo's screen. I chatted with one of their customer service representatives, and they acted like I was the first person to encounter this problem. Amazon Kindles can highlight text in .mobi files with no problems. It cannot be that difficult for Kobo to fix the highlighting problem that their devices have.

I'm sorry but I don't think I've ever seen any of the issues reported in the post you quoted, and I've owned Kobos since 2012. I don't know about epubs, but with sideloaded kepubs (i.e. epubs bought from other stores and sent to my Kobo using the Kobo Extended plugin) the highlight process works perfectly fine. It's vastly improved from how it used to work in the past, certainly as fast as my PW3 by now, and I've never had any problems with highlights being deleted. What format are you using?

[robko]

I just tried this in both sideloaded epub and store bought Kepub and it worked on both. I made sure I was well past the 20 page mark. I even went back to page 1 and added a highlighted then skipped forward again and I could still make a highlight. This was on a Forma (device shouldn't matter with this) with current firmware.

[Heath Watts]

Thanks for your reply. I've tried multiple epub and kepub side-loaded e-books and had the same problem with both formats. I'm using a 2019 Kobo H2O Aura with the latest firmware. I tried the previous two versions of the firmware and had the same issue. There are several threads on mobilereader.com discussing this same issue. Several suggested solutions are also given in this forum, but I haven't found one that works.

[Heath Watts]

Thanks for your reply. There are a number of threads on this site where people discuss the problem that I'm having, so I'm not an isolated case. I have a 2019 Aura H2O with the latest firmware.

If you put you Kobo to sleep, does it save the highlights to page 20?

I can save the highlights for the first few pages in each chapter in some books, but after the first few pages, the highlights disappear after I turn it off then on again.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by Heath Watts

Thanks for your reply. There are a number of threads on this site where people discuss the problem that I'm having, so I'm not an isolated case. I have a 2019 Aura H2O with the latest firmware.

What version firmware is that? As there have been two releases in the last week, plus another earlier in the month, saying "latest firmware" doesn't really tell us what you are running.

If you put you Kobo to sleep, does it save the highlights to page 20?

I can save the highlights for the first few pages in each chapter in some books, but after the first few pages, the highlights disappear after I turn it off then on again.

That sounds like a bug that exists in 4.15.12920 and is fixed in 4.17.13694. There were problems with annotations in internal files that didn't exist in the ToC and another problem where there were multiple entries. The latter only happened after about 25 paragraph in the chapter.