How to export book annotations from Kobo Touch

Highlighting text from the books you're reading is one of my favorite features in my very precious Kobo Touch. They are called "annotations" and unfortunately there is no obvious way to export these to your PC in case that you want to use them or save them. However, here I'll explain a not-difficult way to export your annotations to a file in your PC for later use.

Your Kobo has a database which saves information about the books you're reading, including the annotations your take. What we'll do is take the annotations from such database and save them in a file. Piece of cake. Here's what we do:

1. Let's find our database!

Connect your Kobo to your PC. Browse the content with your file browser and you'll see Kobo's folder: ".kobo", inside you'll find a file called "KoboReader.sqlite", that's our database.

2. Let's prepare our environment:

Create a new folder somewhere in your PC, I'll call it "Koboann". Copy the database KoboReader.sqlite from your Kobo device to this folder.

3. Get the program to read the database:

This database can be read with a small and very practical database engine called SQLite. Go here http://www.sqlite.org/download.html and download the procompiled binary (the executable) for Windows (or your OS whatever it is).

Unzip the file (sqlite3.exe in the case of Windows) in the Koboann folder.

4. Let's read the database and extract those annotations:

Create a new file and call it "work.bat", edit it and copy the following:

sqlite3 KoboReader.sqlite < extr_annotations.txt

Now create a txt file and call it "extr_annotations.txt" and copy the following:

.output annotations.doc
.separator "\r\n"
 SELECT VolumeID, Text, Annotation
 FROM Bookmark;
.exit

5. Final check and result: 

Now you must have 4 files in your Koboann folder:

Now double click work.bat and that's it! A file called annotations.doc will appear in the same folder with the annotation info you need.

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The original idea comes from the Kobo Reader forum in MobileRead forums (I can't find the exact post :s), I tweaked the parameters to fit my needs, feel free to add your own ideas and share them.