Newb in search of a few answers

[Andy North]

Hello all,

I am new to technology, to this forum, to Calibre, to CC and to everything else related! So, be patient, please!

Also, I have tried to answer the following questions by reading the forum, the FAQs etc. without a lot of luck.

I started by learning about Calibre because I have been losing tons of annotations for my books on Kindle (which I use on Mac, iPad Pro and iPhone 6) and I don't want it to happen again. Then I bought CC to be able to read on iPad and iPhone. When I got it, I thought it was a reader. Now I do understand it is not. Everything works well but I have two main questions.

1) Which reader would you recommend for iPhone/iPad in terms of features and simplicity of use? Which readers would give me the option of stopping to read on iPhone, for example, and continuing from the same point, at a later time, on iPad?

2) I do not understand how I can sync between CC and Calibre so that annotations I make on my books on iPhone/iPad are saved back in my Calibre collection (Ideally keeping an original 'clean' copy and an annotated one).

Again, if I am asking silly questions or in the wrong place, please be nice and help me understand what I should do, instead.

Thank you in advance for your help and kindness!

A

[pwalker8]

What format are your books in? Which reader to use depends on the format.

Kindle, iBook and Marvin all sync between devices. I normally convert all my books to epub, so I use Marvin to read.

I'm afraid I don't have any experience with annotations.

[HarryT]

Neither Calibre nor Calibre Companion will be of any help in storing annotations. There is no standard for annotations; different brands of reading device store than in different ways.

[Andy North]

Thank you pwalker8 and HarryT! About format, I use epub and I am happy to use Marvin 3, which I have, to solve the part of my problem that relates to syncing across devices.

About annotations/highlights, however, aren't they simply metadata? If so, whatever the reader I use, shouldn't it be possible to save a copy of the book with the annotations/highlights included and transfer that copy back from CC to Calibre, to have all my material in one place? Can I actually move stuff from CC to Calibre instead of the other way round?

HarryT, I appreciate your response but it would be even more useful if you had a suggestion to solve this problem, as I am 100% sure I am not the only person out of 7B people who is experiencing it!

Thanks again!

A

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Andy North

About annotations/highlights, however, aren't they simply metadata? If so, whatever the reader I use, shouldn't it be possible to save a copy of the book with the annotations/highlights included and transfer that copy back from CC to Calibre, to have all my material in one place? Can I actually move stuff from CC to Calibre instead of the other way round?

The only metadata CC writes to calibre is "did you read the book? yes or no" and the "date you read the book." You may not be alone with this issue but CC is not the answer.

You asked the question in the CC forum. You might want to be a little more respectful to those who give you a direct simple answer about Calibre Companion's abilities / limitations. Just because you don't like the limits doesn't give you the right to be disrespectful about the answer provided.

You might want to seek an answer to your annotation question in the Calibre or the Apple Devices forums.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Andy North

About annotations/highlights, however, aren't they simply metadata?

No. On a Kindle, for example, they're stored in a completely different file to the books itself. Other devices will store them in a different way. As I said originally, there is no standard way of storing annotations and no way of moving them between different devices. They lie outside the design scope of Calibre and CC.

[Andy North]

Thank you Harry! As you clearly have so much more experience than me, can you think of any way in which I could achieve my objective of having annotated copies of a book all saved in a central repository? I guess converting it to a PDF and using a PDF annotator would be one way to achieve this, but if I could avoid PDF documents I would be very happy!

Best wishes,

A

[Andy North]

Hello DoctorOhh, I am sorry if you interpreted my response as being disrespectful! I would be curious to know what made you feel like that...

Best wishes,

A

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by Andy North

Hello DoctorOhh, I am sorry if you interpreted my response as being disrespectful! I would be curious to know what made you feel like that...

Best wishes,

A

I expect it was this statement (which was entirely unnecessary and comes across as snarky):

Originally Posted by Andy North

HarryT, I appreciate your response but it would be even more useful if you had a suggestion to solve this problem, as I am 100% sure I am not the only person out of 7B people who is experiencing it!

As has been mentioned, there is no standard way of storing annotations for ebooks, hence, there currently isn't a method that's interoperable between reading systems (even epub to epub). If you want annotated copies that will work from system to system, I expect converting to PDF for annotating is your best option.


Marvin

You mentioned using Marvin 3. While Marvin doesn't automatically sync annotations at the moment, you can export annotations from Marvin to Marvin (as .marvinz file) and even backup these .marvinz files to iCloud, Dropbox, etc. To do this, while the ebook is open, tap in the middle to get the menu, go to Contents, Annotations, tap on the icon on the top right corner, Export (Marvin -> Marvin). You can send it to any app available in the share sheet. I regularly AirDrop Marvin annotations from iPad to iPhone and vice versa.

You can also export annotations to other formats (EPUB, PDF, HTML and CSV) but this export options only contains the highlighted text and won't be linked to the original EPUB. The process is the same as above except you select Export (multi-format).

Marvin also has a backup feature which backs up all your books, annotations, bookmarks and settings. I usually do a backup of my Marvin library every now and then which I send to Dropbox so I have backups on my computers.


Other iOS EPUB Readers

There are EPUB readers on iOS that do support automatic sync of annotations (and bookmarks and reading position). Three I know of are iBooks, Hyphen and MapleRead. iBooks and Hyphen both use iCloud for syncing. MapleRead requires creation of a free MaplePop account to sync data.

Thus far, Marvin is still my preferred iOS reader app so I'm not very familiar with the others. I've tried them, found they were missing some key features/options and went back to Marvin.

[Andy North]

Thank you for all your help!

I did not intend at all to sound 'snarky'. In part, it might be due to the fact that English is my third or fourth language so I am not always able to convey my message in an appropriate way. This said, I would disagree with the assessment that my response was 'entirely unnecessary'. It is true that HarryT answered my post, and I truly appreciate that, but it is also true that, knowing he was talking to an absolute beginner, a bit more direction/information would have been useful. I base this on how I would behave and it is, of course, just my opinion.

This said, thank you so much for all the information you share with me! I have been playing with Marvin but I find it a bit confusing. Also, I haven't been able to find a decent manual for it. Finally, it looks like there are glitches that require attention. For example, when I highlight a passage I am unable to delete the highlight. I will try some of the other ones you mention (I am also testing Bluefire).

All of this takes me to a final question (well, for now at least!) All of these readers seem to have ways of importing and syncing books independently, and building libraries in the cloud. So, given that CC is not a reader, what is its use? What can I do with CC that I cannot do without? ... It may sound weird to somebody like you with a lot of experience, but that's really not clear to me...

Best wishes,

A

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by Andy North

Thank you for all your help!

I did not intend at all to sound 'snarky'. In part, it might be due to the fact that English is my third or fourth language so I am not always able to convey my message in an appropriate way. This said, I would disagree with the assessment that my response was 'entirely unnecessary'. It is true that HarryT answered my post, and I truly appreciate that, but it is also true that, knowing he was talking to an absolute beginner, a bit more direction/information would have been useful. I base this on how I would behave and it is, of course, just my opinion.

This said, thank you so much for all the information you share with me! I have been playing with Marvin but I find it a bit confusing. Also, I haven't been able to find a decent manual for it. Finally, it looks like there are glitches that require attention. For example, when I highlight a passage I am unable to delete the highlight. I will try some of the other ones you mention (I am also testing Bluefire).

All of this takes me to a final question (well, for now at least!) All of these readers seem to have ways of importing and syncing books independently, and building libraries in the cloud. So, given that CC is not a reader, what is its use? What can I do with CC that I cannot do without? ... It may sound weird to somebody like you with a lot of experience, but that's really not clear to me...

Best wishes,

A

CC exists to simplify the transfer of content from calibre to either an Android Tablet or an iPad. It has two distinct modes of operation.

One as a Wireless Device which when connected to calibre on your computer allows you to "push" content from your computer to your tablet, and in fact to fully manage content transferred via calibre and CC to your tablet.

The second is to connect to the calibre server on your computer and "pull" content from your calibre to your tablet.

Once content is on your tablet you're able to browse the transferred content and select a book to read which then launches the appropriate application on the tablet.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

[Andy North]

Thank you Peter! I noticed, however, that with Calibre you can save a book to any directory, including, for example, Dropbox. If I saved books in Dropbox and then accessed them through Marvin or any other reader, would I be missing something that CC offers?

Again, apologies if the question sounds like a very naive one!

Best,

A

[ilovejedd]

Given the restrictions on storage for iOS, CC is less useful there than on Android. I do believe the iOS version lags behind the Android version in terms of features, too.

Personally, I just use Dropbox or Calibre's built-in content server (if I want to browse by metadata) for pulling content from PC to iPad. Marvin integrates better with Dropbox than other sources, anyway.

[Andy North]

Thank you ILJ, very useful!

Best,

A

[peaceridge]

Originally Posted by Andy North

Thank you Peter! I noticed, however, that with Calibre you can save a book to any directory, including, for example, Dropbox. If I saved books in Dropbox and then accessed them through Marvin or any other reader, would I be missing something that CC offers?

Again, apologies if the question sounds like a very naive one!

Best,

A

Andy, my use for CC on my Android tablets and phone is to have a place to store my books and then pick which reader I want to use - for example, I use one reader for epubs, a different one for pdfs and a third one for comics. Of course you could just load the different types into the different readers the first time, but then you would not have a central database for all your books.