Exporting highlights from Books app no longer works on iOS 16 [bug report]

Agreed. I’ve done this already. You can email apple’s current CEO for direct customer feedback/feature request. I can’t post his email here because the forum automatically blocks it, but it is public so just Google it.

Get your point, will consider it.

BTW, good news is, Apple Books sync highlights among devices. E.g., the highlights added on iOS version, will also be synced to to macOS version, thus could be imported to Klib.

I also found that I can export highlights to email (by tapping highlight --> the arrow on the right side --> share). However, the new iOS only allows me to export a single highlight in an one-by-one manner, as opposed to all highlights as available in previous iOS versions. I also share the same opinion that the functionality of sharing all notes and highlights is essential.

I have also tested this new feature (exporting each note and highlight to iCloud Notes) many times. I found that iOS 16.0.2 (20A380) will not always pick up the highlights and notes properly. Sometimes, it picked up the highlight only and skipped the notes. This happens about 1-2 times per 10 times. It is really inconvenient to extract highlights and notes in this manner (one-by-one), instead of once-and-for-all like iOS 15.

Try Zotero, an open-source reference management tool used by many scholars, authors etc. It seem to extract highlights from PDFs quite nicely though it doesn't accommodate epub files. Once you install Zotero, drag in a PDF that contains highlights. Then right click on it and choose Add Note from Annotations.

I can't get this to work reliably. Once or twice I succeeded with SHFT, possibly once with CMD, and once with CMD A, the standard "select all" command. But mostly I could not select all the highlights. When I did get it to work, dragging succeeded when the destination was a text file but not a Word doc (in the latter case I only got the first highlight). Dashes in the text produced errors and only one or two page numbers came over. I'd be interested to hear the results of some experimentation on this front; maybe we can come up with something that works reliably. Meanwhile Klib works great, though page numbers aren't retained. Easy to get these as needed from the book however. And the highlights come in to Klib completely clean and free of transfer artifacts.

For Apple: I use highlights for personal and academic notes.

I find it an important part of my daily life to be able to lookup my notes from a book quickly, as this may be done multiples times over a day.

please bring back this feature. Or we will need a better open source option for reading.

also submitted feedback at https://apple.com/feedback

Aaaaaargh 😫 Why are you doing this Apple??? Why do you remove useful features like this? This is completely messing with my workflows.

Do I need to find a completely new reader app again? I already went through all of this and Books was the only acceptable one.

Agreed. Much easier to do on a Mac than on an iPad. But the exports are tedious to export and annoying, Each section of exported text contains the "Excerpt from. . .This material may be protected by copyright" notice as well as an unnecessary link to the book in the Apple Bookstore. The process is tedious, even on a desktop, and once the highlights are exported one must still search and replace all those notices and links. Apple has either been thoughtless with its update or is making a deliberate effort to discourage the export of highlights and notes. This supposed upgrade, together with the confused design of the new 10th generation iPad, makes me wonder if the company still knows its customer.

Deleting this functionality is ridiculous.

That said, you can "share the book" into a new quick note in Apple Notes, thus creating a constant small window shortcut which will appear every time you open that book. Maybe it could be used as a way of making notes not in the book itself, but at least in a separate note.

No, unfortunately. Although I would call it a loss of feature rather than a bug.

Personally I switched to Google’s Play Books which saves all highlights and annotations to a Google Docs document automatically.

This is extremely annoying. Being able to export my highlights was my favorite - and probably most used - feature. Bring this back!

This doesn’t seem to be fixed in 16.2, I guess it’s just not a priority.

Definitely time to switch to another app and leave the Apple Book store/book reader for the duration

Just discovered this myself. Major bummer. I use Books because at least you can sync highlights across devices with books from any source (unlike Kindle). But exporting was important. We seriously need an open-souce alternative.

Yes, totally -- there's a way to remove those lines if you're comfy with terminal/grep

grep -f file_with_lines_to_remove.txt -v file_with_copied_highlights > output_file.txt

see also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60684292/grep-approach-to-remove-all-lines-in-file-that-match-any-line-in-other-file

Yeah, "does the company still know its customer" is something I'm also wondering