From: Dan (dan_at_dbdigitalweb.com)
Date: Sun Jun 13 2004 - 12:21:13 PDT
>Is there a means to preserve the worked-on books? I figure that the
>most convenient trick would be to export the books back on a desktop
>machine and to have a reader capable to open them or a converter
>capable to transform them to RTF, or PDF, or whatever.
>If no such capability exists, it means that the Newton "holds a
>monopoly" over the books, each time you want to revisit old reading,
>print segments, being obliged to dock you Newton, make room on it,
>get the book back on it, etc.
Ok the marks or annotations are saved in the "library" soup according to the
ISBN number. Which is why you always want to make books with a unique ISBN
number as you can't install books with same number. And books that you have
marked up if they have the same ISBN as a book you just installed, it will
appear marked as the previous was.
As for how long the annotations stay, it depends on the version of Newton
you have. If you have a 1x0 model message pad, then it only remembers the
last 10 books you installed. After that when you install number 11, the
oldest accessed book in the library soup is deleted to make room for the new
book. Now if you have a 2x00 or emate, every book is kept in the library
until you delete it via a soup editor.
You can backup the library soup via a soup editor, or print them out (as was
previously mentioned). But to keep the soup for later editing I would say
back it up if you have a 1x0. The best way to do this is to just copy the
soup and rename it the book with the annotations you wish to keep, then to
restore delete the current library soup and rename the backup as the library
soup was. Do a soft reset (reboot) and you will have your old library as it
was.
You could also Fax the book to yourself and have your computer save it as
image files. Then it would be easy to create PDF's if you wanted.
The only other method of preserving annotations might be (if you have a 2x00
or emate) to use Newtworks and Newtscape to copy the book from the book
package to a Newtworks document. However I don't know if the annotations
will copy as well. Perhaps Woody can chime in here as to weather that works
or not (I know he has copied books to Newtworks before).
As for the "Newton "holds a monopoly over the books", you can use Paul's ATA
driver and get a large ATA flash card (or even microdrive). Then you can
have a LOT of books on hand at any time. But if you have more than 10 books
on a 1x0, don't count on it holding your place as it will only hold the last
10 used books. And to be honest, I doubt if the 1x0 Newton will even allow
you to install more than 10 (unfrozen at least). But I know it will work on
a 2x00 or emate as the library soup is not limited to 10 entries.
I also should mention a great tool for the NewtonBook user called XNewtbook.
It allows you to backup the library soup, go directly to pages that have
annotations, and have more bookmarks per book. The only downside is it seem
to have a bug in the restoring of a library soup (at least it never worked
for me). But you can use a soup editor as I previously mentioned to restore
the backup it makes.
-Dan
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