

Ask HN: How to annotate epubs like pdfs? - drieddust

Annotations on pdf are easy and once you annotate, they remain with you. However, epubs don&#x27;t allow this so annotations are tied inside proprietary programs and often lost.<p>EPUB3 seems to have portable annotations standard but I don&#x27;t know of any programs actually implementing this.<p>How you guys manage your annotations?
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Turing_Machine
I haven't seen anything good, either. There's some code hanging around in the
Readium repo, but it doesn't seem to be getting much love (understandably...
they've got bigger fish to fry, what with trying to implement the impossibly
overengineered and baroque EPUB3 standard).

Conceptually it shouldn't be hard to do such a thing, as long as the EPUB
isn't DRM. An EPUB is just a ZIP under another name, and is basically a
collection of web pages along with some XML metadata. You should be able to
unpack the EPUB and read it/annotate it with a web browser and any existing
web annotation tool. If you saved the annotations to the same file tree, you
could pack it all back up and ship the annotations with the file (you'd need
to add any new files to the manifest to ensure that the file still validated).

That would be clumsy, but portable.

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mjklin
One solution I've found is this: the iOS app Voice Dream allows you to take
highlights and notes while listening to an epub file being spoken by your
choice of voice. Then you can export the annotations as a text file in this
format:

CHAPTER NAME

(percentage of the way through the text)%

HIGHLIGHTED TEXT OR NOTE

I find it suits my use case.

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arorplk
Kindle for Mac/ PC has a pretty good highlight feature and note feature for
Epubs. Haven't run into anything else decent.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Kindle uses MOBI/KF8, not epub.

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olegious
I upload my non-Kindle ebooks to Google Books and use the app to do all my
note taking and highlighting.

