How do you deal with highlights in ebooks?

[hondabf]

I finished reading Atomic Habits the other day and highlighted a lot of paragraphs. I was mostly sure the Kindle would remember every Note and Image I had highlighted.

Unfortunately when I exported the notes to my e-mail, I found out that neither the images and the sub chapters were appended to the export (the sub chapters were available in the table of contents), forcing me to manually add them on a separate markdown file.

I sent this book through the Send To Kindle website, and considering how tall is the walled garden within Amazon nowadays, I believed they purposefully made the highlight export this awful for Personal Documents.

I tried exporting the highlights in some of my other bought books from Amazon and found it was almost the same save for some special books.

Annoyed by the incompetence of Amazon, I decided to test the highlighting export in KOReader but ended up with almost the same results no matter what service I used in export (HTML, Markdown, Joplin, JSON, Clippings file, and simple Text)

So now I was wondering how do you highlight your books (and in case you did), how would you include the images and subchapters (considering the book is well formatted)?

[j.p.s]

I gave up on highlights and notes years ago because every step was far too awkward and slow.

[Sirtel]

I almost never highlight anything. In the few cases I've done it, images and subchapters didn't matter to me.

Yeah, exporting highlights is a pain. But at least we can export them with ebooks; with paper books you can't export anything.

[haertig]

The way I understand it - and I could be wrong - is that highlights and related stuff in ebooks are stored in a proprietary format by vendors (Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.), access to the stored data is via proprietary programming, and sharing the stored data is controlled by proprietary algorithms.

How we got to this point is probably due to vendors wanting to lock you into their walled gardens by only giving you access to this stuff when using their devices and their software. "Export" is a way to get data out of an ecosystem and "Import" it into a different ecosystem. This is not something a vendor is going to want you to be doing, since that provides you a path to escape their walled garden.

So in general, you should expect exporting data like this to be difficult if not impossible, and this is "by design" from the vendor. Sure, they'll advertise that so-and-so device allows you to export data. This is for advertising purposes only. What they don't tell you is that the data they will allow you to export is probably useless stuff, and not anything that you'd want to export in the first place. But, they were able to use the "export" word in their advertising to draw in more customers (albeit, kind of on a false pretense).

The above is a general reply on generic problems you might encounter when trying to export. I do not know the details of specifically what Amazon will allow, or Apple, or Google, or any other vendor. Personally, I do not highlight in my ebooks (except for local use), based on the above generic problems I know I'd run into if I wanted to do exporting in any meaningful way. I would consider using highlighting/sharing to a more significant extent only if I were willing to live in the walled garden that vendors have designed it to keep me in. But that's not my nature, so I forego this "feature" of ebooks for the most part. If I run into something important in an ebook that I want to remember or refer back to later, I write it down on a piece of paper. If it's something I really want to remember, or want access to in the long term, I'll take a picture of my written notes with my smart phone and then upload the image to my home server (specifically, the "Paperless-ngx" application that I run in a Docker container on my server). Yes, by then, the notes are totally separate from the ebook. But that's what "export" means.

[DiapDealer]

They also want to make sure they don't make it simple to "export" an entire book a few highlights at a time.

[nana77]

I don't really use it, but I saw them on Calibre, within the device I use (Kobo):
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kob...ration_Options

Kobo has a feature called "Export Annotations" which exports the annotation from the book and keeps it as nameofthebook.txt on the Export Annotation folder in the Kobo main directory. You need to change or create the option on the Kobo Configuration File to enable the Annotation Export. Kobo Configuration Option.

You can use the Annotation plugin in Calibre to extract annotations from Kobo to a custom column in Calibre.

You can use the Kobo Utilities plugin for Calibre which has features to copy, backup, and remove annotations from selected books from a Kobo device.

It doesn't supports handwritten notes iirc, and seems to support colour's highlights.

[hondabf]

I totally understand Amazon does everything it can to keep users in their ecosystem, but it's absolutely hysterical that even when I'm in their ecosystem, their highlighting system for both personal documents (Send to Kindle) and purchased books is as basic as it is useless-

I was mostly wondering how did people here managed their highlights so they included the subchapters, images and notes altogether.

Do you guys use a separate service to something like Readwise or Bookcision?
Really, that's all I care about. I think we all said enough about Amazon's incompetence with anything nowadays.

Originally Posted by nana77

I don't really use it, but I saw them on Calibre, within the device I use (Kobo):
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kob...ration_Options

It doesn't supports handwritten notes iirc, and seems to support colour's highlights.

I skimmed through this, it will be useful when I buy a Kobo ty

[itsvlady]

I read on Kobo, never heard it's even possible to export highlights with images. I'm having a hard time just exporting plain text from it. I know I'm not helping here, but I'm shocked you can actually export more than just the text

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by nana77

I don't really use it, but I saw them on Calibre, within the device I use (Kobo):
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kob...ration_Options

It doesn't supports handwritten notes iirc, and seems to support colour's highlights.

I use this feature a lot in Calibre. I don't write notes, but I do highlight, particularly in nonfiction. If I want notes, though, I am going to write them somewhere else as I go, usually in Obsidian.

[tomsem]

I don't expect highlighted images to export, and only highlight them in order to add a Note (and I've only ever done it for one book: a book of chess problems where I enter the solution as a note).

The image itself is not shown in the Note list itself, just a location reference, so it's not clear what use case would require that to be a part of the export.

Legacy export was a text file, if I remember correctly, which by definition cannot have images. Now it is to a PDF link. So, sure they could add a thumbnail to Note list and export it to PDF. That would be nice to have, but might in some cases be copyright issue or at least something to negotiate with publishers (noting that publishers can set limit on number of highlights).

I do highlight frequently but rarely export. But for my use cases, export is perfectly acceptable.

I doubt PocketBook or Kobo have anything better (I have one of each but have not investigated or compared).

There a W3C EPUB Annotations Use Cases and Requirements document that may one day be a specification or standard.

https://w3c.github.io/epub-specs/wg-...notations-ucr/

Also a much earlier idpf.org draft specification for Open Annotation which obviously never went anywhere:

https://idpf.org/epub/oa/

[nana77]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I use this feature a lot in Calibre. I don't write notes, but I do highlight, particularly in nonfiction. If I want notes, though, I am going to write them somewhere else as I go, usually in Obsidian.

Thanks for the suggestion! It won't be bad for me to learn a newest approach, as like using Obsidian to link translators and notes, my handwrittings are still not so clear even to mine latterly lol.
Thanks .

[cellaris]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I don't expect highlighted images to export, and only highlight them in order to add a Note (and I've only ever done it for one book: a book of chess problems where I enter the solution as a note).

The image itself is not shown in the Note list itself, just a location reference, so it's not clear what use case would require that to be a part of the export.

Legacy export was a text file, if I remember correctly, which by definition cannot have images. Now it is to a PDF link. So, sure they could add a thumbnail to Note list and export it to PDF. That would be nice to have, but might in some cases be copyright issue or at least something to negotiate with publishers (noting that publishers can set limit on number of highlights).

I do highlight frequently but rarely export. But for my use cases, export is perfectly acceptable.

I doubt PocketBook or Kobo have anything better (I have one of each but have not investigated or compared).

PocketBook has an option to save a screenshot of a selected area as a note. It can be used to include an image or preserve text formatting, but I’m not sure if that would be useful to anyone. It can be exported just like any other note.

Personally, I underline the passages that interest me, but I don’t export them. They remain saved in the e-reader’s notes app. I think e-readers are designed for reading, not for note-taking. That’s why any option to export notes, however rudimentary, seems more than enough to me. I don’t ask for much in this regard.

[jackm8]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I almost never highlight anything. In the few cases I've done it, images and subchapters didn't matter to me.

Yeah, exporting highlights is a pain. But at least we can export them with ebooks; with paper books you can't export anything.

You write in the book, maybe use pagemarkers, and you have annotated book. Simple. It's ebooks that are a problem, with various formats, proprietary solutions, and no cohesion, even across devices of same manufacturers.

ps. The method mentioned by Cellaris is still my favourite for ebooks. It's far better than all to me known pen annotation things. I just export screenshots of my annotations to pc, and they live in a folder there.

[shuvashish76]

I'm using KOReader 99% of the time so https://github.com/kyxap/koreader-calibre-plugin for storing them in Calibre and all my highlights are synchronized via https://github.com/jasonchoimtt/koreader-syncthing across devices (syncthing is running as "local discovery" mode i.e. internet isn't used).

You just have to setup them once and with single gesture at KOReader you sync everything