How to Copy and Paste Highlights into Notes or Search Highlighted Phrases

COPY AND PASTE HIGHLIGHTS INSIDE YOUR KINDLE NOTES AND FOR KEYWORD SEARCHES

This is updated information from earlier Kindleworld blog postings that describe undocumented ways that make notes and searches easier, especially Searching a book for a name or character in the book without having to type the name.  The methods are only slightly different for older Kindles and the current Kindle 3 (UK: K3)

You can Copy and Paste words or phrases for Searches within a book or for searching the Net to find out more about what you're reading.

As I've said before, the Kindle keyboard is no speed demon unless we're counting the speed of mistakes that can be made on those little keys.  I've gotten used to it and I use the keyboard often now because I'm forever searching in a book when I see a name but can't, as usual, remember who the character is, first introduced maybe 70 pages back (or even only a few pages back).

  Searching on a name or character (or event in a book) brings up a listing of each Kindle page or "location number" that has a mention of the name, word, or phrase being searched -- along with surrounding paragraph for context (and an active link to each location).

  Because the often multiple results are listed in divided rows down the screen, I can also get more context for the character just by perusing the several paragraph summaries.

  When I first posted this, I was riveted by a then new account of Columbine by Dave Cullen (the book later wound up on the Best Books of 2009 of several newspapers, including The NY Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Times, etc.)   The link in this paragraph quotes the Washington Post review of the wholly different take Cullen has on the incident.  There are a lot of people involved in this story, and I did want to remember who they were and the circumstances, which led me to post about the shortcut to finding all mentions of someone in a book.

  It's a great feature that many don't use.  We have choices of searching the book or the entire Kindle or Wiki or the full Net (free 3G Net searches from almost anywhere), using the 5-way button to select from all the options available as we move to the right.  The Kindle 1 offered searches of the entire Kindle (a much longer process) but none for just the book we're reading.

Copy and paste highlighted passages TO a note used in your Kindle
In connection with Amazon's new feature at the time which lets us see, on a private webpage for our Kindle, all our highlights and notes for each Kindle book we own, I noticed I'd done a lot of highlighting which is helpful for discussions, or as memory-joggers, but I'd typed very few notes.  Why?  It's because it takes a while to type on the small keyboard, accurately.

Notes we make are ALSO copied into our "My Clippings" file, which we can copy or move to our computers to print or edit.  Highlighted sections are also copied into that courtesy file.

 However, sometimes I'd like to add a thought about something from a passage I'm reading.  I really don't want to type the passage, so I've wished for a way to copy and paste an excerpt to my book's "Notes" box and add, to that Note, shorthand thoughts, on the Kindle.  This can be expanded on a computer later.  Wish granted.

The following steps are for For Kindle 2's, modified for Kindle 3's, and for DX's

  1.   Begin to highlight the sentence(s) you want to reference in your note by pressing down the 5-way button where you want to begin the copy.

  2.   5-way down, and at the last line to be excerpted, 5-way right, to the end of the referenced passage.   Do NOT press the 5-way button down to end the highlight.

  3.   Instead, press the space bar.  That'll bring up a search field.

  4.   Your now-highlighted passage is pasted into the Searchbar on Kindle 2's and DX's and into a Note-box on Kindle 3's.

  5.
  For Kindle 2's and DX's
   Now 5-way to the right, through several options, until you reach
   the "note" option.

  For Kindle 3's
   Upon a press of the spacebar, you don't get a Searchbox.
   Instead you get a Note-box as a main focus and
   with seemingly fewer options, but if you go to the bottom
   and keep 5-waying to the right, you'll see other options.
   In this case, we want to stay with the Note.

  6.
  For Kindle 2's, DX's
   Press down the 5-way button on "note" and you'll see
   the highlighted portion entered automatically into
   a Note-box.  You can now add some thoughts
   about the highlighted portion just pasted in.

  For Kindle 3's
   You are already in the Note-box and can save the note
   on the Kindle
   or save & share it on Facebook or Twitter. That process
   lets you write a cover note as well.

Tip: Anything you highlight, copy and paste this way, you have options to, instead, Google or search in Wikipedia or your Kindle's dictionary or on the Kindle itself.  But we've chosen "note" here because this makes notes about designated passages quite a bit easier.

I should also point out that Amazon customers worldwide can use their 3G Kindles' wireless 3G cellphone-network connectivity for accessing Wikipedia, free, from your Kindle book, even if free web-browsing is not available in a particular country. See What is 3G and what is WiFi? (Link is: "bit.ly/kw3gwifi" .) ( Remember that the "http://" portion doesn't have to be typed into current web browsers or even on the Kindle's web browser.)

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Most Popular Free K-Books U.S. & Int'l (NOT UK):    Top 100 free UK-Only:    Top 100 free USEFUL for your Kindle (U.S. only, currently):   99c Notepad 1.1,   99c Calculator,   99c Calendar,   99c Converter

Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's)   K3 Special ($114)   K3-3G Special ($139)   DX Graphite

Kindle Tips - How to reverse an image's white on black and vice versa

REVERSING AN IMAGE'S FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND COLORS
  This tip is for making a 'negative' version of an image on the page and is useful when there's text involved that is hard to read in its given white on black format or when reversing an image would make something in it clearer to you.  It's not something that most will ever want to do, but it was necessary in my case when I could not read the white text on black background in a Kindle book.

 The image-examples at the left (you can Click on them to see the larger versions) are from a book in which this situation came up too often.  Apropos of nothing except to identify the source of the examples, the Kindle book that presented this problem a few times is "Lost Ate my Life, a book which only LOST TV series fans could enjoy.

  This book often presented an image on a page which had tiny white text on a black background, to highlight that it was text being quoted from a forum discussion.  The person who did the layout made the image so small that it was totally unreadable and it was driving me crazy.

  I remembered that highlighting a sentence or a larger segment reverses the text foreground and background, so I tried highlighting an image to see if that would do the same to an image.  It does.  This works on Kindle-2 and Kindle-3 (UK: K3) models.

  When you do a highlighting of a segment of a Kindle book page, you arrow to the beginning of the area you want highlighted and then you Click the 5-way button to begin the highlight.   After that beginning-click, the straight, vertical line that is your Kindle cursor becomes a slanted vertical line, indicating that your highlighting begins there.

  If you then move that cursor to your right you'll identify what is to be highlighted and you'll see white text on black.  Then you would normally click the 5-way button again to End the annotation or highlight, but we don't normally want a permanent highlighting when reversing an image so we press the "Back" button instead, to cancel the highlighting process after viewing the image.

  (ADDED TIP: Actually highlighting an image {finishing the highlight process instead of cancelling it} makes an "annotation" that shows up in the Menu option "View Marks and Notes" just as a bookmark on that page would, with the text that follows the image given as context.)

  You use this useful annotations feature to do the same for an image.
  1. If an image is at the top of a page, normally you'd cursur-down to get to it faster, as the default cursor location on a new page is at the top.   So, cursor down to get to that image.

  2. Your cursor MAY go into the center of the image and give you the option to zoom it (showing you a tiny magnifying glass.)

  3.   Move the cursor to the left of the image using the 5-way button, unless your cursor already just went to the left of the image, which happens also.  You then see a straight, vertical line.

  4. Click the 5-way button.  The cursor line then slants, indicating you are beginning your highlighting.

  5. Then use your 5-way button to go right one step.

That will highlight the image and reverse it.

  6. When you're finished viewing the reversed image, press the "Back" button to cancel the highlight unless you want the Kindle to show that image-page as a highlighted, annotated section that you get to with via the Menu (button) selection to "View Notes & Marks" feature.

  There are other ways to do it, going backwards but this is the easiest way.

Hope some will find this useful on rare occasions!


Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   K3 Special, $114   DX Graphite

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Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or £5 Max ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.

Undocumented Copy and Paste of 1) Highlights into Notes 2) Search phrases

COPY AND PASTE HIGHLIGHTS INSIDE YOUR KINDLE NOTES AND FOR KEYWORD SEARCHES

This is updated information from two postings for the Kindle 2 a year and a half ago, including the one for Searching a book for a name or character in the book without typing the name which was posted on June 14, 2009.

  Since then, we have the Kindle 3 (UK: K3), which changes the process just a bit.
Copy and paste words or phrases for Searches in a book or on the Net
As I've said, the Kindle keyboard is no speed demon unless we're counting the speed of mistakes that can be made on those little keys.  I've gotten used to it and use the keyboard often now because I'm forever searching in a book when I see a name and can't, as usual, remember who the character is, first introduced maybe 70 pages back.

  Searching on a name brings up a listing of each Kindle page or "location number" that has a mention of the name, word, or phrase being searched -- along with surrounding paragraph for context (and an active link to each location).

  Because the often multiple results are listed in divided rows down the screen, I can also get more context for the character just by perusing the several paragraph summaries.

  When I first posted this, I was riveted by a then new account of Columbine by Dave Cullen (the book later wound up on the Best Books of 2009 of several newspapers, including The NY Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Times, etc.)   The link in this paragraph quotes the Washington Post review of the wholly different take Cullen has on the incident.  There are a lot of people involved in this story, and I did want to remember who they were and the circumstances, which led me to post about the shortcut to finding all mentions of someone in a book.

  It's a great feature that many don't use.  We have choices of searching the book or the entire Kindle or Wiki or the full Net (free 3G Net searches from almost anywhere), using the 5-way button to select from all the options available as we move to the right.  The Kindle 1 offered searches of the entire Kindle (a much longer process) but none for just the book we're reading.

Copy and paste highlighted passages TO a note used in your Kindle
In connection with Amazon's new feature at the time which lets us see, on a private webpage for our Kindle, all our highlights and notes for each Kindle book we own, I noticed I'd done a lot of highlighting which is helpful for discussions, or as memory-joggers, but I'd typed very few notes.  Why?  It's because it takes a while to type on the small keyboard, accurately.

Notes we make are ALSO copied into our "My Clippings" file, which we can copy or move to our computers to print or edit.  Highlighted sections are also copied into that courtesy file.

 However, sometimes I'd like to add a thought about something from a passage I'm reading.  I really don't want to type the passage, so I've wished for a way to copy and paste an excerpt to my book's "Notes" box and add, to that Note, shorthand thoughts, on the Kindle.  This can be expanded on a computer later.  Wish granted.

The following steps are for For Kindle 2's, modified for Kindle 3's, and for DX's

  1.   Begin to highlight the sentence(s) you want to reference in your note by pressing down the 5-way button where you want to begin the copy.

  2.   5-way down, and at the last line to be excerpted, 5-way right, to the end of the referenced passage.   Do NOT press the 5-way button down to end the highlight.

  3.   Instead, press the space bar.  That'll bring up a search field.

  4.   Your now-highlighted passage is pasted into the Searchbar on Kindle 2's and DX's and into a Note-box on Kindle 3's.

  5.
  For Kindle 2's and DX's
   Now 5-way to the right, through several options, until you reach
   the "note" option.

  For Kindle 3's
   Upon a press of the spacebar, you don't get a Searchbox.
   Instead you get a Note-box as a main focus and
   with seemingly fewer options, but if you go to the bottom
   and keep 5-waying to the right, you'll see other options.
   In this case, we want to stay with the Note.

  6.
  For Kindle 2's, DX's
   Press down the 5-way button on "note" and you'll see
   the highlighted portion entered automatically into
   a Note-box.  You can now add some thoughts
   about the highlighted portion just pasted in.

  For Kindle 3's
   You are already in the Note-box and can save the note
   on the Kindle
   or save & share it on Facebook or Twitter. That process
   lets you write a cover note as well.

Tip: Anything you highlight, copy and paste this way, you have options to, instead, Google or search in Wikipedia or your Kindle's dictionary or on the Kindle itself.  But we've chosen "note" here because this makes notes about designated passages quite a bit easier.

Kindle 3's   (UK: Kindle 3's),   DX Graphite

---

Check often: Temporarily-free late-listed non-classics or recently published ones
  Guide to finding Free Kindle books and Sources.  Top 100 free bestsellers.
UK-Only: recently published non-classics, bestsellers, or highest-rated ones
    Also, UK customers should see the UK store's Top 100 free bestsellers.