Syncing highlights and notes from sideloaded files accross devices.

[JJAH]

Hello guys, I'm a long time lurker and an even older user (like, ten years) but lost my mail and password a long ago.

I know come to you with a silly, silly question regarding syncing highlights and notes from sideloaded files accross devices.


Sooner or later I intend to buy a new Kindle, quite possibly the Voyage. Now, before that happens, I understand that annotations and highlights from Amazon ebooks are automatically synced between devices, but what happens to sideloaded books and PDFs? Will those marks be synced to the new Kindle? Will the files appear with those marks when transferred to it?
I'm really interested in knowing with exactitude because a very, very large part of my collection consists on sideloaded stuff. All legal though. Don't get yourselves wrong.

Then, when I sideload the files to the new Kindle, will the marks appear on their own? Or am I stuck?

[JJAH]

Yo, I've found that notes can be kept by manually copying the .PDR file that is in the same folder as your pdf. Let me give you an example:
BLAH.PDF BLAH.PDR
I've only tried it within the same kindle but it has worked for me. I've yet to test it using two Kindles, and also with highligths.
Although I've noticed that some PDF don't display highlights properly in the "View Notes and Marks" screen, so I didn't bother with something that might not work properly.

[eschwartz]

Correct -- however, note that while old devices store annotations as {book_title}.(pdr|mbp1|etc), the new devices store them as {book_title}.sdr/{book_title}.(pdr|mbp1|etc) -- that is, in a folder next to the book, with a .sdr extension. You need them to match properly.

[JJAH]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Correct -- however, note that while old devices store annotations as {book_title}.(pdr|mbp1|etc), the new devices store them as {book_title}.sdr/{book_title}.(pdr|mbp1|etc) -- that is, in a folder next to the book, with a .sdr extension. You need them to match properly.

Oh boy, thanks for the reply. Is there a tool to migrate those notes and marks? Or am I out of luck and have to do it manually?

[NiLuJe]

Hmm, rsync and a bit of elbow grease? There might be some custom Python stuff laying around on GitHub that does that kind of stuff, but I might be a tad optimist there...

[JJAH]

Originally Posted by NiLuJe

Hmm, rsync and a bit of elbow grease? There might be some custom Python stuff laying around on GitHub that does that kind of stuff, but I might be a tad optimist there...

Considering my mad, non-existant skills, I'll go with the good old manual mode hahaha

Thanks for your answers.

[eschwartz]

Some sort of bulk rename tool might work.

EDIT: In linux, what about the following cli solution:

find -regex '\./.*\.\(azw3r\|mbp1\)' -exec sh -c 'for x; do ext=${x##*.}; needdir="${x%.*}.sdr"; fname="${x##*/}"; mkdir -p "${needdir}"; mv -- "${x}" "${needdir}/${fname}";  done' _ {} +

If you use Windows you just need to install Gow and use gfind instead of find, or use cygwin, or find your own solution. It seems from google that your average bulk rename program does not support creating directories, and I have no patience to find a windows batch/powershell solution (I am terrible at either).

Credits to http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/24141 and good ole trusty http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html (I am slowly getting the hang of it...)