Keeping your place, highlights and notes in sync across devices, for ebooks you own

If you buy from one shop and read in its apps, your place, your highlights and your notes follow you from phone to tablet to e-reader. That is a large part of what keeps people in those shops.

Books you own as files fall outside all that. Open the same EPUB on a laptop and a phone and you have two separate copies, two separate places, and highlights that live wherever you happened to make them.

Why "where you were" is harder than it looks

The obvious way to remember a place is a page number or a percentage. Neither survives the journey. Pages depend on the font, the size and the screen, so page 112 on a phone is page 40 on a laptop. A percentage drifts the same way, and drifts again if the book file is replaced by a corrected edition.

A position that survives has to name a spot in the text itself: this paragraph, this word. Then any screen can lay the book out however it likes and still open at the same sentence.

The same goes for highlights. A highlight stored as "a box on page 112" is lost the moment the text reflows. A highlight stored as "these exact words" stays put.

What your options are

• Stay in one ecosystem. If all your books came from one shop, its sync is good. It does not cover the files you own from elsewhere.
• One reading app everywhere. Some apps sync their own data between their own installs. KOReader, for instance, can sync reading progress between KOReader devices through a sync server. It works well if you only ever read in that app.
• A highlights collector. Services such as Readwise gather highlights from many sources into one place. They collect what you marked; they are not where you read.
• A library that is also the reader. Keep the books in one place you open from every device, and the place, the highlights and the notes are kept with the books.

What to look for

• Positions that name a spot in the text, not a page or a percentage.
• Highlights anchored to their exact words, so they survive a font change.
• Notes you can find again without opening the book they are in.
• A way to take all of it with you: if your notes cannot leave, they are not yours.

How Lexarii remembers

Lexarii's reader runs in the browser on your laptop, tablet and phone, and it remembers your place on every device, whatever the font or screen. It paginates like a book, with light, sepia, dark and black themes.

Highlights and notes stay with the words they mark, and your recent notes are gathered in one place. Highlights already made in a PDF are brought in too, and your file is never changed.

On an e-reader, Lexarii's library is an OPDS catalogue, so KOReader, Thorium, Foliate and other reading apps can open it. An app reading that way keeps its own place and its own highlights; they do not flow back into Lexarii. A free-software Android app is being built for F-Droid to close that gap; it is not released yet.

Everything leaves with you. While you subscribe, and for 30 days after, "Download everything" gives you one file with your books, notes, highlights, reading positions, collections and conversations.

Try it

Open the demo on two devices, read a chapter on one and pick it up on the other. When you want your own books there, one plan covers them all, or run it yourself, free.