How to keep notes when converting between formats?

[orcabloom]

Let's say I have a mobi file, and I make some highlights on it while reading on my kindle paperwhite. Then I decide I want to convert this book to a different format (for example, AZW3) and I want to keep all my notes/highlights so that they show up when I'm reading this book in its new format on my kindle. Is there a way to do this?

It didn't work very well when I tried a test. The highlights and notes existed on the kindle with the new format, but they weren't visible in the text; I could only view them in the "Notes" menu, and even there they weren't at the proper locations (they all believed themselves to be at the same location at the beginning of the book).

When I did this test I plugged my kindle into my computer, navigated to the kindle drive > documents folder > author of the book in question, and then I deleted the mobi file from this folder and replaced it with the AZW3 file of the same book. I made sure not to touch any of the "sidecar" files that accompany the book file and which I believe contain metadata. I did notice that these files had exactly the same names and file extensions before and after the conversion. (I did the format conversion using Calibre in case that makes any difference.)

If anyone has insight on whether this problem can be overcome, it would be appreciated.

[j.p.s]

The notes files have different formats and extensions between azw3 and mobi. there are utilities to read them but I do not know of anything to convert them.

One difficulty would be that positions are byte offsets from the begining of the book text and mobi and azw3 have different lengths because of differences in formatting.

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The notes files have different formats and extensions between azw3 and mobi. there are utilities to read them but I do not know of anything to convert them.

One difficulty would be that positions are byte offsets from the begining of the book text and mobi and azw3 have different lengths because of differences in formatting.

It's easy for automation to deal with that -- look up the position in the first book, capture some text (sans formatting) around the position, look for that text in the second book starting at the same position (since it is probably somewhere *near* there, even if not actually there), use the new position if found. If not found, just use the position unchanged (and warn) because it's better than losing the note.

(Have I done it? No, but I've written similar tools for different very non-ebook-like formats which do just this, and it works.)

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by NullNix

It's easy for automation to deal with that -- look up the position in the first book, capture some text (sans formatting) around the position, look for that text in the second book starting at the same position (since it is probably somewhere *near* there, even if not actually there), use the new position if found. If not found, just use the position unchanged (and warn) because it's better than losing the note.

(Have I done it? No, but I've written similar tools for different very non-ebook-like formats which do just this, and it works.)

Of course it can be done. amazon oviously have tools to do it. I was a little sloppy with my wording. By one difficulty, I meant too tedious and time consuming compared to my interest in doing it to even consider spending time on it. (I am the sole judge of "too" for how I spend my pro bono time.)

There is also the matter that I am not aware of any available tools to write the notes files.

I won't be holding my breath waiting for any to appear and I am not going to take a stab at it.