Odyssey Annotations, how to extract them

[amibz]

Hello,

I'm a recent owner of a Cybook Odyssey HD and I mainly buy it to read articles for my Ph.D research.

So I highly use the annotation features (I tap the upper right of the screen to show quickly the annotation menu).

I use Calibre to manage my book collection. I've seen that there is in Calibre a function to get the annotation back from the device. But apparently it works only with a Kindle.

I try also to read the .epub or .pdf with Adobe Digital Editions 2.0 (on mac os), and each time I open a file with annotations it crash..

So for now the only solution I've found is to connect the Cybook, open the folder "Digital Editions" and inside this folder there is an hidden folder named "Annotations".

Inside this folder you can find .annot file, which when you open it with a text editor is basically an XML file.

Here what it's look like for an .epub :

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<annotationSet xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/digitaleditions/annotations" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/">
<timestamps>
<timestamp name="bookmark" value="2013-03-04T15:16:32"></timestamp>
<timestamp name="annotation" value="2013-03-04T15:13:36"></timestamp>
</timestamps>
<publication></publication>
<annotation color="#EE00EE">
<target>
<fragment start="index_split_001.html#point(/1/4/22:1)" end="index_split_001.html#point(/1/4/23/5:165)">
<text>The annotation I made on my epub or pdf</text>
</fragment>
</target>

So the annotated text is in between the <text> </text>

I manage to use regular expression to extract only these part.

Search and replace with regex : </text>*.*<text>

After that I have a text file with only the annotations, but no page indication from where they are.

I'm also using Zotero and this could be useful in my work.

Does anyone manage to transfer the annotation made on a Cybook back to a PDF on a computer ?

[nlundberg]

I'd really like to see this working in Calibre...

[joepsichip]

I'm sorry for my English.
I hope to help someone with my speech.

The fastest way to annotate / highlight is to press and hold with two fingers selecting the text reference. A window will appear directly with the choice between annotations or underlining. The manual does not seem to talk about it.

I would be very interested to export function of the notes.

[nlundberg]

The manual also does not mention that you can tap upper left corner for table of content or the right one for annotations. But this does not seem to work with pdf documents.

[AlPe]

Hi all,

here you can find a Python 2.x script to extract the annotations and highlights from an .annot file generated by the Odyssey.

You need Python 2.x and python-lxml installed. Confirmed to work under Linux and Windows.

Usage:

$ python export_Odyssey_notes.py [ARGUMENTS]

Arguments:
 -h, --help          : print this usage message and exit
 -f, --file <file>   : <file> is the path to .annot file
 -c, --csv           : output CSV values, instead of human-readable strings
 -o, --output <file> : write output to <file>

Exit codes:

 0 = no error
 1 = invalid argument(s) error
 2 = specified file not found
 4 = provided file is not a valid .annot file
 8 = output file cannot be written

Examples:

 1. Print this usage message
    $ python export_Odyssey_notes.py -h

 2. Print annotations and highlit passages in human-readable form
    $ python export_Odyssey_notes.py -f ebook.epub.annot

 3. As above, but output to output.txt
    $ python export_Odyssey_notes.py -f ebook.epub.annot -o output.txt

 4. As above, but output in CSV form
    $ python export_Odyssey_notes.py -c -f ebook.epub.annot

 5. As above, but output to output.csv
    $ python export_Odyssey_notes.py -c -f ebook.epub.annot -o output.csv