Changing Kindle: Importing Books With Highlights/Notes

[andylev]

Hey there,
I've been using calibre with a Kindle Touch and it has been working great.

I just got a new Kindle PaperWhite as a present, and I wanted to export my books from the Kindle Touch into the Paperwhite, with their respective notes and highlights (they were not amazon-bought, so there's no automatic sync).

But i cannot find a way to import the books from Kindle Touch into Calibre with notes and highlights, to later import them into Paperwhite. I'm able to import them without highlights (the My Clippings.txt gets imported, but doesn't affect each individual book)

I read that each books notes/highlights info gets stored into a .mpb file, but i'm able to find that file in calibre.

Thanks

Andy

[LadyKate]

Originally Posted by andylev

Hey there,
I've been using calibre with a Kindle Touch and it has been working great.

I just got a new Kindle PaperWhite as a present, and I wanted to export my books from the Kindle Touch into the Paperwhite, with their respective notes and highlights (they were not amazon-bought, so there's no automatic sync).

But i cannot find a way to import the books from Kindle Touch into Calibre with notes and highlights, to later import them into Paperwhite. I'm able to import them without highlights (the My Clippings.txt gets imported, but doesn't affect each individual book)

I read that each books notes/highlights info gets stored into a .mpb file, but i'm able to find that file in calibre.

Thanks

Andy

Calibre will not import the mbp files. As they are not protected, you could copy over the mbp files to a temp directory and then sideload them to your kindle to the proper location.

I am assuming that would be possible. I used to manually copy mbp file from one ipaq to another along with the mobi files.

[andylev]

@LadyKate

Thanks for the reply. Just tried that, but didn't work

But i did notice is that in my Kindle Touch i don't have a .mbp file for each book, but an .mbp1 (and a .mbs and .apnx).

Tried copying all of them to the proper location.

There must be a way to do this. How do people handle changing readers in cases where they haven't bought everything from Amazon?

[eschwartz]

Newer Kindles (from the Kindle Touch and on) handle annotations using a {bookname}.sdr folder next to each {bookname}.azw3 file. The {bookname}.sdr folder must have the same filename except for the extension, and inside the "sdr" folder you will find the *.(azw3r|azw3f|apnx|mbp1|mbs) files.

As long as you copy over the ebooks and the annotations files in the same folder structure, your annotations should transfer over seamlessly.






Older Kindles, e.g. the Kindle Keyboard, stored the annotations in a *.mbp file I think. Also, they weren't kept in the "sdr" subdirectory.

[andylev]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Newer Kindles (from the Kindle Touch and on) handle annotations using a {bookname}.sdr folder next to each {bookname}.azw3 file. The {bookname}.sdr folder must have the same filename except for the extension, and inside the "sdr" folder you will find the *.(azw3r|azw3f|apnx|mbp1|mbs) files.

As long as you copy over the ebooks and the annotations files in the same folder structure, your annotations should transfer over seamlessly.

Thanks for your reply.
Tried this exactly but didn't worked :/

[eschwartz]

Well, I don't have the latest PW to check that it works the same, and I suppose a firmware update could've pulled a ninja but I don't think they are supposed to do any different...

What do the books you've downloaded though Amazon look like, file-structure-wise?

[andylev]

file-structure-wise all my books exactly the same, just like you said: a {bookname}.mobi file and a {bookname}.sdr folder with a {bookname}.apnx and {bookname&weirdstring}.mbp1 and .mbs files





If i copy this exact structure from the Touch into the Paperwhite i get the book, but no highlights/notes appear

[eschwartz]

Huh, the filenames for the .(mbp1|mbs) files appear to have a junk string on the end. I don't know how it got there in the first place, but it *should* mean highlights/notes don't work on the PW or the KT!!!

The files inside the {bookname}.sdr/ directory need to be consistently named -- {bookname}.(mbs|mbp1|azw3r|azw3f)

P.S. We have an attachment feature if you "Go Advanced" in the reply box. Per the posting guidelines your image is oversized and will probably be deleted by a moderator -- attaching the image is IMHO preferable in general to inline images, and also avoids this issue.

[Apethae]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Huh, the filenames for the .(mbp1|mbs) files appear to have a junk string on the end. I don't know how it got there in the first place, but it *should* mean highlights/notes don't work on the PW or the KT!!!

The files inside the {bookname}.sdr/ directory need to be consistently named -- {bookname}.(mbs|mbp1|azw3r|azw3f)

Late to this party, but I had the same issue (transferring non-Amazon docs with highlights/notes from a Touch to a Paperwhite v2) and had some luck, at least on the small scale.
I made a backup of the subfolder off the old Kindle Touch's Documents folder that contained my book/notes/highlights and placed that on my PC.
Those .mbp1 and .mbs files with the garbage characters after them are generated by the Kindle Paperwhite the first time you open the doc on it after copying over from the older Kindle... seems to be some kind of recognition that the files were not created on the Paperwhite. But, if you load up the Paperwhite on your PC or Mac, determine which (by size or date comparison to the backup .mbp1/.mbs file on your computer) are the ones containing your data, and copy the garbage string out of the newly created filenames, you can delete the new files, paste the garbage string into the old filenames (no spaces, just immediately between the end of the filename and the period at the start of .mbp1 or .mbs), save the change, then eject your Paperwhite and open the doc, your notes/highlights should be restored (they were for me, at least).
There may be a more elegant way to do it with Caliber's Fetch Annotations feature (discussion here: http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?_...x32DKH2YTPALR9) but as I only had one book I really, really needed to transfer notes from I just futzed around til I found the above kludgy solution. If you have a huge number of files to do this with Fetch Annotations may be the way to go.