At the start of the year I stopped buying books at Amazon and shortly after stopped using my Kindle. I have a BOOX Nova 2 e-ink device that I can use to read and annotate material. Since May I also have a Kobo ereader that E gave me as a gift.
While reading I make notes and highlights in the books I read. I had my Kindle set-up in such a way that any Amazon annotations I made would automatically end up in my personal knowledge management notes. For the BOOX device I have a similar set-up although it requires a manual step (connecting the device to my laptop and transferring files).
For the Kobo device I am now trying to figure out how to get annotations into my notes.
The basic path is similar to the BOOX device.
Kobo should have an option to access annotations from your Kobo account online, but I could not find it.
Using Greg Morris’ description (archive link) I edited the hidden config file on the Kobo device, activating the export option locally. That creates a menu option for each book on the device to export annotations and highlights to a text file. Similar to the BOOX device that text file can then be retrieved from the device.
There are three types of books on my device.
- Books bought through a Kobo affiliated platform and downloaded to the device,
- Books side loaded from my Calibre library,
- Books accessed through the Kobo Plus subscription our household has.
It seems to me like the annotations of all three are treated separately and differently by Kobo. Kobo itself states that annotations from side-loaded books will not be synced to your Kobo account (although as stated I don’t see any option to access any other annotations through the account either).
Looking at the exported annotations of a Kobo Plus book, I noticed that the location of an annotation is shown when looking at the overview of annotations on the device, but is not listed inside the exported text file of annotations. The location also isn’t exact, but ordered by book chapter. Having the location of an annotation to me seems a key piece of information, and it’s odd that it isn’t in the exported file.
I will have to explore more how to bring my Kobo device annotations into my notes in a usable way.
I’ve also been thinking about a setup for my e-reader and getting out of the Amazon eco-system. My plan is to install KOreader (https://github.com/koreader/koreader) on my Kindle and use Readest (https://readest.com/) on my other devices. The great thing is that they’re both open source and you’re even able to host all of the Readest sync yourself. Readest has just implemented progress sync with KOreader and highlights sync will follow in the coming weeks: https://github.com/readest/readest/issues/1729