Making notes in/on ebooks? What about audio books? Advice?
I read a lot and make notes or marks on pretty much every book I read.
I do something I think a lot of people think is terrible: I fold page corners.
As I read fiction I fold corners of pages I loved. In non-fiction I fold as I go then I write up my own contents page at the front when I'm done so I can go back to the parts I might want to cite or look into in more detail later on.
However, for ease of access/time-constraints I'm reading progressively more e/audio-books. I'll typically get paper or hardback copies too if I really enjoyed it for reference and to have on the shelf.
I cannot for the life of me find a simple system for notes in this context. In ebooks I make "bookmarks" as I go in whatever app I'm using but then I have to transcribe the passages out in their entirety into files because page numbers don't really work well for ebooks. Audio books are even worse!
My notes are way harder to collect and then separate from the book and I have to move them around with wherever I move the epub/mobi OR they're trapped in whatever app I happened to be using at the time.
How do you do it? Am I missing something obvious or is this just something that physical books offer the best options for?
I feel like ebooks should offer more flexibility overall. The downside to my notes in the physical books is that I can't take them with me. But currently I'm not even really able to do that with digital either.
Posted Apr 24, 2017, 8:06 AM UTC
Not sure what ebook you're using (some app? Kindle? Nook?), but atleast in Kindle and the Kindle app you can underline stuff and add notes to them. Super easy and you can also easily go through them whenever.
On audible audiobooks there's clips and bookmarks to use. You can adjust the time stamps on them as well and add notes to them, and afterwards they're all listed for you in the book's info.
If none of those appeal to you, you could just use an actual notebook and take notes on that. All ebook have a location number for where you're reading. Just add that number and your note to your notebook and later on just get to that location number. On audiobooks I guess you could just write down the timestamp.
I'm definitely considering the separate notebook idea. I just like the fact that with the physical book I'm tying to notes and the information together fairly strongly; they're on the book. Whereas even with a notepad or an app they are stored in the notepad or the app. I think really I wish there was an easy way to physically manipulate the ebook file itself but that's probably asking too much lol.
Physically? An ebook? :P You probably mean something else. I'm not sure why you find the note putting that hard though... you simply press the location you want your note added to and write your note...
Yeah, but then if I open the file on my PC that mark isn't there. Or an my tablet, which uses a different app from the kindle; notes aren't there either. If there was an app the could edit the epub/mobi with custom bookmarks so I could add my own contents page I could keep my "library" in a dropbox folder or similar and have the notes be everywhere.
You might be able to. When you highlight in a Kindle, all your notes with the passage you're annotating are put into one big file. I think it's a doc you could send to yourself and print or whatever, but I'm not sure because I usually just treat my notes as another eBook. If you're using the same app consistently, your notes should go across all of them. Sorry for the Kindle-centric explanation, but I think it's similar in other apps.
Audiobooks are much more annoying. On Audible you can bookmark clips, but even that's a pain in the ass, and you'd have to transcribe them. I think the notebook might be your best bet.