- Does your reader / viewer software support you annotating, and highlighting, and bookmarking (that is your “reading state”), and quoting from documents to your blog, to Facebook, to Twitter?
- Where does your viewer keep your reading state?
- Keeping it inside the epub file has advantages (easier to share),
- keeping it apart has advantages as well (leaves the document itself untouched and intact).
- The viewer should at least make “the state” available to you (iBooks doesn’t, right?!?), and maybe assist you in administering it.
- …
A few answers and comments:
- it appears to me, that http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/viewer.html only supports bookmarks (and keeps them inside), but no annotating and no highlighting
- iBooks offers quite a few nice features, but it does not make the state available to you
- I don’t really mind keeping annotations and quotations in separate articles in a blog or a wiki
- bookmarks are nice to have (“how far have I gotten yet?”), but they are not too important, I don’t even mind losing them
- …
The killer question:
- what happens to your state, if you “upgrade” your document?
- …
I started reading epub documents (created / converted by calibre) on the Mac using iBooks. I enjoyed its “feature-richness”, but I find it repelling, how much it supports you and makes you unaware, of how dependent it makes you on it.