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

Thank you very, very much, Vladimir!!! I tried it and to works very well. It is somewhat cumbersome but your method does do the job nicely. The original Apple method told you the date and the chapter of the book, which really helps, but at least this method transcribes the whole highlight.

Hopefully Apple in their process of improving the Apps (Books, Pages, Numbers and Music for instance) has been leaving out some important features that were available in the previous versions... For me sometimes that feels like a downgrade, not an upgrade. I do not understand why they do it!!!

This makes Apple Books virtually useless for recipe books. I need to at least have an external link back to a recipe. I’ve spent a fortune in Apple Books on recipe books. This is not friendly at all.

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.

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.

Wow! Thank you very much.

I was looking for a way to export my notes and this is very helpful. Still waiting for Apple to give us back a way to natively do it, but your work is very much appreciated.

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.

Book Fusion is another option. It claims to export all highlights. Also: "We support all major eBook formats, like PDF, MOBI, and EPUB, among others." So perhaps this is a one-stop solution . I tried Book Fusion briefly but had problems with the built-in reader (which you don't have to use evidently). Klib appears to be quite useful, especially if you're a Mac user, and for now at least this will be my solution. Gets highlights out of EPUB but not PDF (for the latter, use Zotero, which I recommend in any case).

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.

I think for this to work you have to shift/click etc to select all and then drag onto a text file right away. If you do anything intermediate, including clicking another window, it doesn't work. You'll have to click Table of Contents or Bookmarks (on upper left) and then click Highlights again, kind of refreshing the whole operation. Once again you'll get a single shot at selecting all via shift and dragging somewhere. It's finicky but plausible.

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.

Late iOS16 adopter and just ran into this extremely poor "betterment" to Books. I HATE when developers remove useful features for no good reason. After reading all these comments I've settled on using Google Play Books and so far like the feature of setting up Google Drive to auto sync notes. Just make sure to turn on the feature first (had to Google that one to figure it out). Stupid Apple...this is disappointing.

I have gone back to the Kindle an Google books app, both allow exporting the rather extensive notes I take. Unfortunately, I now have a number of books trapped in Apple Books that are no longer useful to me.

This is the kind of rubbish that Google usually pulls.

Regrettable.

Pretty much all ebooks come with DRM, so you need to choose carefully.

Much as I hate Amazon, Kindle does allow export of up to 10% of a book in notes and markings, so not really a problem. I do tend to do a lot of highlighting in non-fiction books...

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