Ebooks, how to

How to save excerpts from Kindle ebooks using your iPhone

11.17.09 | No Comments

iphonepixeplpipegoogledocs

Earlier tonight I figured out how to use my iPhone and a couple of free online services to take notes while reading, and then I realized that it was exactly the sort of thing Kindle readers with iPhones could take advantage of.

Why? Because the iPhone Kindle app doesn’t let you make annotations, or highlight sections, or save passages for later review. My solution isn’t perfect, but it will at least help you save pages of text so that you can turn them into useful notes later. I imagine students and writers in particular will find it helpful.

Two notes:

1. Pixelpipe is the key to making all of this work. It’s a free service that lets you upload images once, then send them to dozens of different websites or online services.

2. I’m going to use iPhone and iPod Touch interchangeably for the rest of this post.

OCR on the go with iPhone-Pixelpipe-Google Docs

What you need:

First, set up a “pipe” at Pixelpipe to Google Docs. But not the normal Google Docs–right next to it in the Pixelpipe list is one with a little “OCR” badge, which stands for Optical Character Recognition. It makes sense that Google would have some nifty OCR technology, considering the amount of effort the company has put into its book scanning project, but I never noticed it as a feature with Google Docs before.

You can probably figure out the rest. As you’re reading on your iPhone Kindle app, when you reach a passage you want to save as a note, take a screen capture of it (press the “Home” and power buttons simultaneously). This resulting screen capture will automatically be saved in your Photo library.

Whenever you’re ready, open the Pixelpipe app on your iPhone and upload the selected screen caps to your Google Docs OCR pipe. Because Pixelpipe lets you selectively upload images to other web services, you can also send that pic to Evernote, Flickr, a blog, your grandma, an FTP account, or whatever. You get the idea.

A few minutes later, a new document will appear in your Google Docs collection. It will be named the same name as the image you sent in, but instead of a picture it will be selectable, editable text. Hooray!

My one caveat with this is that the Google Doc OCR doesn’t have the highest fidelity when it comes to conversion. I can only assume Google introduces some sort of deliberate degradation of the image when it converts it, or it randomly adds characters after conversion, because there’s no way I’m buying that Google’s OCR is this shoddy. I tested it out with a couple of pristine screen caps of text to see what a perfect conversion would look like, and the results were about 90% accurate on the first one, and 75% accurate on the second. So, this is clearly not going to be an effective way to pirate a book, but hopefully that’s not what you’d try to use it for anyway.

Instead, it’s a great way to make editable highlights of sections as you’re reading, without having to stop and write anything down at the moment. If you also use Pixelpipe to upload the images to Evernote or Flickr at the same time, you’ll have a reference backup image for any corrections you need to make.

Below is an example of an ebook I screen captured on the iPhone, then Pixelpiped to Google Docs OCR.

iPhone ebook screen cap
ocr-test-source-materialGoogle Docs OCR result
learning theory. To learn about ñnding such a profession al, go to www.aetonline.org.

Q: What other nonmedication ther-apies help?

A: The time -tested ones have already been mentioned: identifying and promot-ing strengths; education; structure; life-style changes; coaching, counseling, and tutoring.

Although as yet unproven, physical exer-cises speciñcally designed to stimulate the cerebellum may become mainstream interventions. There are various pro-grams that do this, such as the Dore method, the Brain Gym, the Interactive Metronome, and the groups of exercises prescribed by occupational therapists.

Nutritional remedies can also help. Ad-ding omega-3 fatty’ acids to the diet is

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