Take Note(s): Highlighting your Google eBooks

Posted by Xinxing Gu, Google Books Product Manager

Like many of you, we love to highlight and mark up our books, capturing insights, important notes to remember, or even gathering opinions to later share with our favorite authors. Starting today, you'll also be able to break out the colored highlighters and pens with Google eBooks in the Web Reader.


To start adding notes, first open your web browser and find your Google eBooks in your My eBooks bookshelf (make sure you are signed into your account at the top right hand corner of your screen). If you don’t have any ebooks yet, you can start your collection with a free classic from Best of the Free bookshelf, or purchase an ebook from our eBookstore. Then, click on the book to open it in the Web Reader.

You should be able to select the text you want to comment on by dragging or double-clicking with your mouse. A context menu will appear, and you can then click on "Add Note".

A notepad will be displayed where you can write down your notes and pick a highlight color too. In addition, you can add multiple lines of notes, and format them with bold or italic font style. To make text bold, place the text between two asterisks (*), and to italicize text, place it between two underscores (_). For instance:

When you click the "Save" button, you will create a new note. Then, when you bring that note up, it will display the formatting you specified:

You can also just pick a color from the bottom of the original context menu to highlight the text, without adding notes:

After adding notes, you can conveniently see all your notes in the ebook by clicking on the "Margin Notes" icon at the top right of the Reader. The menu will show you all the text you've highlighted text and the notes you've made on them. You can click on each result to go to the corresponding page in the book.

To edit or delete a note, hover your mouse over the highlighted text until a pop-up menu appears. Then click on the "Edit" or "Delete" button to make the change.

These new features are currently only enabled for ebooks available in "flowing text mode", and highlights or notes can't be added to ebook samples. We are also working hard on bringing these features to your mobile devices and eReaders, so stay tuned!