[GUI Plugin] KiNotes

[-axel-]

A UI plugin that retrieves annotations from Amazon Kindle readers and places them into the corresponding EPUB ebook for further editing.


Hi there, couldn't find the "how to publish a plugin" tutorial. But well - how hard can it be? Err... I'll just try to mimic some of the other plugin posts. Let's see what happens...

Special Notes:

• Requires Calibre 0.9.22 or later
  
• This plugin is an alpha release. I've tested it with only a few books, so I expect there are still some issues that need fixing. You can try it and help finding the issues ;-)
• If you want your annotations to be stored in the Calibre database instead of the EPUB, you should have a look at the excellent Annotations plugin by GRiker.

Never heard about KiNotes - what is it good for?

KiNotes helps to get annotations made on the Amazon Kindle ebook reader back into a form you can use for further editing. Annotations are highlights, notes or bookmarks you placed into a book while reading it on the Kindle. KiNotes contains tools that allow to read out these annotations and write them into an editable EPUB ebook on your computer. It appears Amazon did not design the Kindle with this application in mind, so KiNotes can not succeed in all scenarios.

Here is what I imagine to be the typical use workflow, which I call the "Proof Reader Scenario":

1. Convert your DRM-free EPUB ebook or document into MOBI format using Calibre
2. Send the MOBI format to your Kindle
3. Go on vacation, read the ebook, and add annotations (going on vacation is optional but highly recommended, at least as a state of mind while reading)
4. Connect your Kindle to your Calibre
5. Install KiNotes plugin into your Calibre (if not installed yet)
6. Select your book in Calibre, press the KiNotes button and wait for the job to finish
7. Edit the new EPUB file

If all goes well up to and including step 6 (did you have a nice holiday?), you will have a new file with a name ending with " + KiNotes.epub" in the folder Calibre stores your book. Open it with your favorite EPUB editor. With most editors you will be able to use the tab key to walk through the annotations quickly in HTML view. Alternatively you can search the plain HTML text for square brackets [ ] or search the HTML text for tags containing 'class="KiNotes'.

Sigil would be a popular choice of editor. I designed KiNotes to work well enough with Sigil. While doing this I found that Sigil does a lot of reformatting and normalization to any EPUB it edits. Those changes are most certainly well intended, mostly harmless in many cases, but sometimes they change the book in unexpected ways. It may change the overall layout in an immediately obvious way; or it may cause local changes which are not so obvious and my go unnoticed for a long time. With this warning in mind, go ahead and use Sigil if you like it. (Personally I would prefer a more conservative editor. Let me know if you find a good one.)


KiNotes does not work with my ebook - why? What can I do?

Here are some known limitations of KiNotes:

• both the EPUB and the MOBI format must be free of digital rights management (DRM) so you and Calibre and KiNotes is allowed to convert and modify the book document freely
• the EPUB must be in Calibre; if not, you can use Calibre to create a new EPUB from the MOBI and then use it for KiNotes
• the MOBI format must be a k7 format, encoded in UTF-8 and having an ASIN book id; Calibre will generate such a format by default
• the texts in EPUB and MOBI format should be as similar as possible. KiNotes will try to match the texts as good as it can, so an added table of contents or some text reformatting can be tolerated. However I recommend to turn off text beautifiers (e.g. those that turn "dumb" quotation marks into “smart” quotation marks), hyphenation tools adding soft-hyphens, and similar
• by the same means KiNotes can tolerate some editing done on the EPUB after it has been converted to MOBI
• currently I recommend to merge annotations from MOBI to EPUB only once, i.e. do not merge annotations into an EPUB that already has KiNotes annotations; maybe someday I'll add support for repeated merges, but I'm not yet sure how exactly this should work...

Something is wrong with KiNotes and should be improved - how can I contact the author and why does this lazy *@$#$!!$* not reply?

As a first step I suggest you post your concern on the MobiRead forum here. Be as specific as possible. Specify which version of Kindle, KiNotes, Calibre, OS, etc., etc., etc. you use. If you found a bug, consider to create a short EPUB/MOBI pair for which the problem happens. Have a look for error messages in the job details and specify any error messages or warnings that have the slightest chance of being related to the problem. There are some smart and kind people around in the forum, so chances are you may get help there. The more specific you are, the better the chances for help.

I'll try to answer forum posts, but knowing myself I have to say there will be times when I just have to focus my full attention on other topics, with no energy left to answer even simple questions. Much of these distractions are caused by my job; should there come a day when I get enough donations to quit the job I promise to answer posts and emails on a daily basis; until then please allow me to be offline for some weeks or months until I get into the mood of working on KiNotes again for the fun of it.

Cheers

-axel-

Screenshots:

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Version History:

Spoiler:

v0.1.0 - 15 July 2013

• Initial alpha release for Windows, Linux, OS X.