Chapter 15. Using Highlights, Bookmarks, and Annotations
Take a look at one of your favorite books, and you can likely find notes in the margins and perhaps dog-eared pages. Jotting down notes about passages that impact you or marking pages you want to come back to visit later is how you make books personalized possessions. Fortunately, you don’t have to forgo these things when using ebooks because your NOOK Color enables you to easily highlight passages and add bookmarks and notes to pages.
Note
Your NOOK, NOOK Color, NOOK First Edition, NOOK Apps, Barnes & Noble eReader for Blackberry, and NOOK Study all support adding highlights and notes. However, notes and highlights entered in the eReader software are not shared with other devices. On the NOOK Color, NOOK, NOOK Apps, and NOOK Study, if you add a note or highlight on one device, that note or highlight is available on another device—except for the Barnes & Noble eReader app.
Using Highlights, Notes, and Bookmarks on Your NOOK
When you think of highlighting something in a book, you typically think of using a yellow highlighter marker to draw attention to portions of the text. Highlighting on your NOOK is similar to that.
A note in an ebook is simply a highlighted area with a message attached. Therefore, the steps necessary to add, view, edit, and delete notes are the same as the steps for using highlights.
Adding a Highlight or a Note
To highlight text or add a note in an ebook, follow these steps:
1. Press and hold a word. The word appears in a bubble, and that is your signal to raise your finger. The word is highlighted and the Text Selection toolbar appears.
2. If you want to highlight only that word, move to step 3. If you want to highlight a block of text, notice the highlighted word is bounded by two black bars. Press, hold, and drag one of the bars to the location you want to end the highlight.
Note
The initial word highlighted must always be the first or last word in the highlight.
3. Tap Highlight to just add a highlight. Tap Note if you want to add a note. If you chose the former, the text is highlighted. If you chose the latter, the Add Note screen appears.
4. Type your note and tap Done.
5. The highlight is added, and a Note icon appears next in the margin.
Viewing, Editing, and Deleting Highlights and Notes
The simplest way to edit a note is to tap the highlighted text. A menu appears, giving you several options:
• View Note: Tap this to view the note. This appears only if a note is attached to that highlight. After you are in the note, you can tap Edit to edit the note.
• Edit Note: Tap this to edit the text of the note. This appears only if a note is attached to that highlight.
• Add Note: Tap this to add a note to highlighted text. An Add Note screen appears. Type in your note and tap Done. This appears only if no note is attached to that highlight.
• Remove Note: Tap this to remove the note. The highlight remains. This appears only if a note is attached to that highlight.
• Remove Highlight: Tap this to delete both the note and highlight.
You can view the note text by tapping the Note icon on the page. From there, you can then tap Edit to edit the text of the note.
To navigate or jump to notes throughout an ebook, from the Reading Tools toolbar (tap the screen), tap Content. Then tap Notes & Highlights. You see a listing of the notes in the ebook. (Scroll if you need to see more.) You see the text that was highlighted, the page number of the note, and the date and time it was last edited. Tap the particular note you want to jump to. The contents screen disappears, and you go to the page with the highlight or note you tapped.
A couple of other notes about this screen’s contents. Two other options exist: Clear All and Notes & Highlights On/Off. If you tap Clear All, you delete all notes and highlights in the ebook. If you turn Notes & Highlights to Off, you turn off the visibility of the highlights and notes. You can turn Notes & Highlights back to On to have the highlights and highlights reappear.
Using Bookmarks
Bookmarks enable you to easily return to a particular page. Unlike notes, bookmarks do not have any text associated with them. Bookmarks work in all your ebooks, magazines, and newspapers.
For ebooks, magazines, and newspapers, to add a bookmark on the page you’re reading, tap the reading screen, and then tap the icon that looks like a bookmark in the top-right corner. It drops down a bit and changes to black. Tap it again to remove the bookmark. Alternatively, you can tap the upper-right corner of the screen to place a bookmark or tap the bookmark to remove it.
To return to a bookmark, from the Reading Tools toolbar, tap Content and then tap Bookmarks. A list of pages containing bookmarks appears. Tap the bookmark you want to go to; your NOOK immediately takes you to that page.
Tap Clear All to remove all bookmarks in that ebook, magazine, or newspaper.