Ask HN: How to annotate epubs like pdfs?

3 points·drieddust··5 comments

Annotations on pdf are easy and once you annotate, they remain with you. However, epubs don't allow this so annotations are tied inside proprietary programs and often lost.

EPUB3 seems to have portable annotations standard but I don't know of any programs actually implementing this.

How you guys manage your annotations?

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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.

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.

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

Kindle uses MOBI/KF8, not epub.

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

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