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Is it possible to share annotations between a Kobo device (I own a Glo, but it should not matter I think) and Calibre internal viewer?

I'm aware that there is a plugin for Calibre that can export annotations out of a Kobo and save them as separate text files, but that's not really what I'm looking for; what I'm interested in would be some way to highlight some text and add comments on the Kobo and display these annotations also when opening the book in Calibre Viewer (of course after a synchronization) and vice-versa.

Is that possible?

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  • I might be missing something, but my Calibre Viewer does only seem to have bookmarks, not annotations. Are you using a patched version?
    – Anthon
    Dec 31, 2013 at 5:41
  • No, I use the standard version and annotations are not supported; it was basically what I was asking, if there are some ways to make this feature available and to keep it synced with my ereader. Considering that Calibre use a text file inside the epub to store bookmarks, I was wondering if someone already thought to improve it to also include full fledged annotations.
    – Sekhemty
    Jan 5, 2014 at 13:51

2 Answers 2

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Apparently Calibre does already have the capability to capture the annotations from Kobo.

When Kobo is attached to your computer, the "Send to Device" logo appears as a menu option in Calibre. If you right click on that logo, the bottom menu option is "Fetch annotations (experimental)". One caution however is that Calibre seems to fetch the annotations for ALL books that are on Kobo (rather than just the book that is currently highlighted), and then copies the annotations for each book on KOBO and appends it to the comments metadata of the corresponding book in Calibre. All annotations are copied including any auto-generated bookmarks that identify how much of the book has been read on Kobo.

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  • Thanks for the elaborate description!
    – Saran
    Dec 1, 2019 at 16:25
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This is possible, but I have not found an "off-the-shelf" solution.

You can add annotations with a work-in-progress-extension for calibre:

enter image description here

The source includes code to handle Kindle notes, but not any for Kobo. However it should be possible to add that starting e.g. from this kobo specific code.

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  • This seems to go beyond my knowledge and expertise. Maybe my best option is to wait until someone creates something that I can use without much tampering.
    – Sekhemty
    Jan 5, 2014 at 14:12
  • Even getting the annotations to run just in ebook-viewer, would require you to run the development version of calibre. I have done that for a while when I wrote the DjVu plugin, but since then I rather prefer the comfort of a tested, released version.
    – Anthon
    Jan 5, 2014 at 14:45

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