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

Workaround – use desktop application. Your books and highlights are synced via iCloud, so you can have them on your mac.

There you open Books app, open your book and tap on "Show highlights and notes" (left top corner).

Then you select all of them:

1. hold Shift and click on the first
2. scroll down and hold Shift again and click on the last

They are highlighted with grey now. Now you can to drag them and drop to you favorite text editor.

I hope this helps.

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.

Here is the link for Apple Books feature requests. I encourage everyone to submit a feature request to bring back notes export. Be polite (I used to work at Apple and it does make a difference). Thanks everyone, let's get this feature back.

Feedback - Books for iOS and iPadOS - Apple

It looks like you can export notes on the macOS books app again.

• Open the Book
• Open the "Highlights and notes" menu at the top
• Select the first note
• Scroll to the last note
• SHIFT + Click the last note
• Now all notes should be selected
• Click "Share" and use email

There is no workaround. I called Apple support and they told me it is impossible to downgrade back to iOS 15. My highlights and notes are forever trapped in iBooks :((

Since this tragic function loss I’ve tried a few other ebook apps, and found that Google Play Books has a fantastic feature: it saves all highlights and annotations on Google Drive in a human readable Google Docs format. It does this real time, I don’t even need to export them. It is possible to import DRM free epubs, and they are synched between all devices. Even if Google kills this feature someday, the Google Docs files will remain so this is a good archival solution.

Kudos to Google on this one!

Google 1 - Apple 0

You can still export multiple highlights, but it takes some more work.

Tap-hold the first highlight, then tap the other highlights and they will be added to your selection. Finally swipe to the Notes app or any other that accepts dragged items, and drop your selection.

See demo here: https://cloud.apparatus.be/oOqMXl

An export function or automation via Shortcuts would of course be much easier, but for now this will have to do.

I have been a Mac user since 1987, but for the past few years I have been amazed at Apple’s tendency to make many features of their apps worse rather than better! They try to improve some things but damage others. This is like shooting yourself on the foot!

This highlight retrieval feature was very important to serious readers, leaving it out is like making Apple devices for child play only! Are they trying hard to make people switch to other systems? This is sad!

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

I created a tool to export Apple Books highlights. It works as long as you have access to the database files. So it's easiest to use on a Mac. https://oliwang.github.io/BooknoteWorthy/?source=applediscussions

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

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.

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.

I wish I didn't update my ipad!! Luckily I have an older ipad that I have not updated and will not update until they fix this issue! I don't see how they thought that it would be a great feature to remove. I have so many notes for school that I can't use outside the book app to study. Super inconvenient.

It looks like Readwise only works with the earlier version of iOS/iPadOS/books

The method they describe on the website requires you to export the highlights from Apple Books and describes the interface as it existed before 16.1