Highlighting and Note-taking in iBooks

In general reading, I'm not a big highlighter or underliner or notes-in-the-margin-er. But when I'm reading a book for a class, I do a lot of that. Well, this is one of the great strengths of iBooks (at least for real eBooks, not PDFs). In an earlier post, I pointed to an article that had some trouble with this feature for the Kindle (including old notes being lost and replaced by newer notes), but I loved this feature in iBooks.

Highlighting is easy. Simply select a word by double-clicking on it and then expand the selection to whatever text you want to highlight. A little menu pops up and click highlight. Want your highlight to be in a different color? No problem. Tap the highlighted area and pick colors from the menu that pops up. There are five different colors.

Now, if you want to see a list of all the thins you highlighted, simply tap the Table of Contents button (it looks like a bulleted list) and click on the Bookmarks tab. You now have all your bookmarks and highlights listed in a scrollable page. It gives you the beginning of the highlighted text, and one click takes you to the page. The only thing I don't like about the bookmarks page is that the highlights are in date order, not page order so if I go back and highlight something earlier in the book, it sticks that highlight at the end.

I love the different colors. When I read a book for a class, I often double-underline or put an asterisk in the margin to note something really important. With iBooks, I simply change the color. I have all my regular highlights in yellow and all my important highlights in blue. The one issue with colors is that it remembers the last color you chose. This makes sense but not for me. I want the normal highlights to be in yellow. If I highlight something in blue, I know I will forget to change it back to yellow the next time I highlight. So, I followed this annoying process: highlight the thing I want in blue, highlight some random word, change the random word's highlight back to yellow (so it will remember yellow for the next highlight), and then delete the highlight for the random word. It only takes a few seconds, but I wish there were an easier way.

One more thing. If you highlight something and then decide you want to highlight the next sentence also (or if you highlighted too much, and you want to unhighlight the last sentence), you can expand the highlight instead of creating a whole new highlight. Double-tap the highlighted area, move the selection bars from the beginning or end and choose highlight from the menu that pops up. It will redo the highlight. The only thing is that you can't double highlight something. For example, if you highlighted a sentence and want to emphasize a word, you can't add a blue highlight for that word if it is in already highlighted passage.

Finally, on the positive side, I love the feature for margin notes. If you've already highlighted something, single-tap it and choose Note from the menu that pops up. If you haven't highlighted something, select it and choose Note instead of highlight. You can then type a margin note. It won't show up in the margin except as a little sticky with a date in the margin, but you can click on the sticky and see the note you wrote. The margin notes also show up as stickies on the Bookmarks page and can be read there without going back to the text.

The biggest drawback I have seen with highlighting is trying to highlight across pages. If a sentence ends at the bottom of one page and continues on the next page, I can't figure out how to highlight it easily. I have been unable to select things across pages. I could highlight it in two pieces, but that seems silly. Instead, I change the font size until it all appears on one page and then highlight it in one chunk.

Overall, the highlighting and note-taking feature is great. With a few small tweaks, it can be perfect. Of course, I still don't know what happens to my highlights and notes if I am no longer using this iPad. I can't see them on my computer, but I hope they are saved there in case I need to transfer them to some other device.