A Farewell to Books?

A couple of days ago I had a very frustrating experience trying to export my Notes and Highlights from a book I had been reading in Apple’s Books. Long story short, it was difficult, they were in a weird random order, and some were missing. A disaster. This matters a lot to me, because I don’t like to be chained to my desk to read, so my ancient iPad is my device of choice, and when I am reading non-fiction, for “work,” I like to be able to make notes accurately and easily. The Kindle is crap for that, like wearing mittens to repair a watch (though I have not tried the Kindle app on the iPad).

Anyway, deeply frustrated, I casually wondered whether Calibre might offer a solution. I’ve long used it for converting e-book formats to make them easier to read on other devices, but never paid attention to its own in-built reader. That was stupid, because it is pretty great. Converted formats look no worse than they do on other devices, and annotating is about as easy and accurate as it is on the iPad. The real winner, though, is synchronisation.

Calibre can establish what it calls a content server that you can access from a browser on any other device. You can then read any book in your library on that device. You do not need Calibre on the device. All the controls are available, the book remains available in the browser window even if you disconnect from the content server, and when you reconnect you can synchronise your reading position and notes and highlights back to the copy in the Calibre library.

At least, that is true over the short term. I have yet to test how well Calibre stores the changes I’ve made while reading in the event of a mishap, like my stupidly closing a browser window. I also don’t know where it stores the copy it downloaded for offline reading.

All in all, this could be the way forward, at least for non-fiction books that I need to annotate. At the very least I am going to give it a thorough workout on the next book on my list, and spend some time reading the Calibre manual more closely. Financial support may well be merited.