Stuff I Make On My iPhone

Text Copying Workaround for iPhone Kindle

Kindle for the iPhone has been my reading platform of choice (except for graphic novels) for the last few months. My one nagging complaint has been the inability to copy text that I can paste into note archives, email, tweets, etc.

I came up with a kludgy, but useful workaround that seemed worth sharing:

• When you’re viewing the text you want to copy in the Kindle application, grab a screen copy by holding the “home” button and then hitting the “power/sleep” button. This will save an image of the screen to your Camera Roll. (Just for fun, the illustration below uses “Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars” by William Patry.)

• Exit Kindle and launch the OCRTOOL Application ($4.99). Choose the image you just captured and let it rip. As you can see below, the recognition is pretty good.

• You can then copy the text to the clipboard and paste it into the application of your choice. The screenshot below is of Evernote, which is a free application to save, organize and share notes and documents on multiple platforms.

Hopefully, the  DRM-crazy publishing industry will come to its senses soon and allow Amazon to build that functionality directly into the application. But until then, this can do the job.