When you’re revising the draft of your manuscript, an ebook reader can be a useful tool. You may have been working on your project for hundreds of hours on a computer, and reading your draft on a different device can help you see the text differently.

Here’s how to get your ebook onto a Kindle or Kobo ebook reader, make highlights and notes, and use them to revise your draft.

Revising your draft

When you’ve completed the first draft of your book, it’s time to start the revision process. Revision and editing are two steps you carry out when you’ve finished a manuscript, and they each have different goals. Part of revision is the big-picture issues, such as the overall structure, theme, and flow of the book, and part is spotting sentences or paragraphs that don’t work, which you might want to change or delete. You may also pay more attention to character arcs during the revision process and decide to add or remove secondary characters.

Since you’ve spent so much time staring at your computer screen, it can be useful to change the way you look at your manuscript. Some people print their draft on paper, and this is a good way to see things differently. Reading your draft on an e-book reader is another way to change your point of view.

The different ebook readers

If you read a lot, you probably have an e-book reader. With E-ink screens that update when you turn pages, these devices have long battery life and offer good contrast. We’ll look at the two main ebook reader brands: Amazon and Kobo.

Both of these companies sell ebook readers in various sizes, with a range of feature sets, from the "basic" Kindle and Kobo Clara, which are the smallest, simplest black and white models, to color devices. And they both make higher-end devices, the Kindle Scribe and Kobo Elipsa, which are tablet-sized devices with styli, designed for reading complex documents and for note-taking.

Exporting your Scrivener project as an ePub

The standard file format used by ebook readers is ePub, and it’s easy to export your manuscript as an ebook file by compiling your project. Compiling a Scrivener project can be complex if you want special formatting options, but exporting your manuscript as an ePub for revision is straightforward. See How to Create an Ebook by Compiling Your Scrivener Project.

Getting your ePub onto your ebook reader

There are several ways to get your exported ePub file onto your ebook reader. Both Kobo and Amazon offer ways to do this. Technically known as "sideloading," this involves either copying files from your computer to the device or, in the case of Amazon, emailing the file to your Kindle’s unique email address. Another option is to use the calibre app, which can manage and transfer ebook files to almost any ebook reader.

Amazon and Kobo also have apps that you can use on your smartphone or tablet, and if you don’t have an ebook reader, you might want to use one of these apps on a device to revise your book.

Highlighting revisions on an ebook reader

When you review your manuscript on a Kindle or Kobo ebook reader, you read the text the way many of your readers will. You’ll have a better idea of the pacing, chapter length, and how the text flows when you see it like this instead of on your computer screen.

When you review your manuscript on an e-book reader, you don’t make any changes to the text; you can’t edit texts like this. You can highlight text – words, sentences, paragraphs, or longer sections – so when you’ve finished your read-through, you can go back to Scrivener and make changes. You can also add notes to highlights, saying what you want to change, or what you might want to add. If you don’t add notes on an ebook reader, you could record them on another device or in a notebook, indicating that, for example, in chapter two, your first highlight is a paragraph you’d like to move to a later position, and another highlight indicates dialog to revise.

If you have a color ebook reader or make highlights on a smartphone or tablet using the Kindle or Kobo apps, you can choose different highlight colors for different types of revisions you want to make and view these colors next to your highlighted text later.

With both of these devices, you can view your highlights at any time on the device: here’s how to do this on a Kobo, and a Kindle device.

With a Kindle, you may know that you can go to read.amazon.com/notebook to view highlights of books you’ve purchased from Amazon, but documents you’ve sent or sideloaded to the device don’t show up there. These highlights do, however, sync to other devices, so you can use the Kindle app on a smartphone or tablet to view and export the annotations for your draft.

With a Kobo device, you have no options to export highlights of sideloaded books. The simplest option is to view the highlights and notes on the device while working on your computer in your Scrivener project. A third-party app allows the Readwise app to import sideloaded book highlights from a Kobo ebook reader, but this may not always work.

Whichever device you choose, you can view your highlights and notes on the device and work with your draft in Scrivener. The Kindle is more efficient, since you can export highlights and notes from the Kindle app on a smartphone or tablet, send them to yourself by email, and open the file on your computer, even adding the exported file to your Scrivener project.