Share actions from Books limited?

Normally when I highlight something on my iPad I have a bunch of options in the share sheet.

When I do that in Books, the share sheet only gives me a few options - Airdrop, Messages, Mail, Facebook, Notes. Clicking “More” doesn’t give me any more options.

The only action I have available is “Copy”. Clicking “Edit Actions” doesn’t give me any more options there either.

I’d like to be able to share a highlight to Drafts. Is this just not possible in Books? Or is there some configuration stuff I’m missing?

I don’t think you are missing a setting, unfortunately.

It just feels like that “share” thing should be customizable on a higher level and be inherited from that higher level.

Speculating: my first thought is it has to do with protecting the copyright holders. This may be applied to everything, even if it isn’t under copyright.
Sometimes the Kindle app limits the amount you can copy from a book for the same reasons.

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Y’know, I started thinking along those lines - then I looked at what it would let me do. I could send the exact same highlight to Notes. Or copy it to the clipboard. I just couldn’t dump it directly into something like Drafts.

Which made the behavior even more weird. :slight_smile:

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It may seem like a chore to email every highlight and then get it from there into Drafts, but I may have a quicker way for you.

On a recent re-read of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, I stopped to highlight all my favourite bits with the idea that I would later copy them out to a quotation app. When I was done I hit the same wall as you, in fact I didn’t even realise you could email a single highlight. But determined to find a way, I kept digging and found what I needed to get all the highlights in one place where I can copy and share freely.

From the open book, tap the page if necessary to reveal the controls. Tap the 'bulleted list" icon top left which gives you a tabbed screen for Contents, Bookmarks, and Notes. Tap on Notes and you’ll see your highlighted passages.

Next, tap on the Share icon in the top left corner. Tap Edit Notes. At top left tap Select All and then the (now enabled) Share button right next to that. Note that when I tried to go through this process on my phone the Share button remained greyed out, but it’s working on my iPad mini. Both are on 14.0.1.

All you can do here also is send an email with all of the highlights, but I did exactly that and I have my collection of quotes sitting in a single draft email. Now I can open the draft (in my case in Spark) and freely select whatever I want and share it in all the normal ways.

And because it seems (possibly?) appropriate to this situation, here is one of those quotes.

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readwise.io can import from Books (and export to Notion if desired), so might give you another option.