The Kindle and other e-readers are generally terrific for sharing quotes and text snippets for research, but they have unfortunate limitations too. The Kindle does not allow a reader to select or share footnotes. It also blocks you from sharing text if the selection is too long or if you have shared too much from a given book.
You can snap and share a photo of the screen with your camera, but the photo is greyscale and unsuited to editing for research. An effective workaround is a Optical Character Recognition app. I use the free Google Lens Text mode on my Android phone.
- Open the Google Lens app on your phone (or tap the Google Lens icon inside your phone’s camera app if available).
- Point your camera at the text you want to copy.
- Tap the “Text” button at the bottom of the screen.
- The text will be highlighted on the screen. You can then select a larger section by dragging the circles at the ends of the highlighted text.
- Tap “Copy” from the menu that appears above the highlighted section.
- The copied text can be shared and edited.