Kindle Highlights for the Command Line
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Note
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THIS IS NOT WORKING CURRENTLY, AS AMAZON CHANGED THEIR SITE |
What is this?
The kindle highlights app gives YOU your kindle highlights without the poor interface Amazon has wrapped around YOUR DATA.
If you are like me, you make a lot of highlights while you read ebooks. I mark vocab words, great phrases, and inspirational sections.
The kindle command empowers you to actually DO something with all those highlights you’ve been making on your Kindle and Kindle apps. The app downloads and caches your highlights. You can then get them in various formats like JSON, CSV, and a nice little Markdown format to run through pandoc or Marked app.
Specifically, you can:
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scrape and parse your kindle highlights and book data
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keep your highlights stored locally
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output in JSON format
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output in CSV format
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output in Markdown format
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do sophisticated queries on your data using the
kindle console
Future plans:
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automatic scanning for vocabulary words
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output in other formats
Installation
Usage:
Warnings and Caveats (HACKER ALERT)
Let’s talk about passwords and security. Using the kindle command line app gives you the convenience to save your Amazon credentials in a file on your computer. This is probably bad. Don’t do it. You’ve been warned.
Hax0rz will hack.
If, however, you intend to keep your password out of the settings file, you’ll need to pass in the --password=<secret> argument every time. Again: Be Forewarned: Your shell is probably configured by default to save a history of what you type in. For that reason, you should be using something like the zsh option HIST_IGNORE_SPACE to "hide" your most-secretest commands.
Step 1: Initialization
kindle init
First you need to initialize the app with some default and/or customized settings, as well as create the database to store your highlights.
To initialize and save your password and username:
# Option 1
kindle --username="[email protected]" --password="yoursecret" initOR
To initialize with just a username:
# Option 2
kindle --username="[email protected]" initOR
Just run the init sub-command without any parameters, knowing you will just have to pass them in later. Every time.
# Option 3
kindle initStep 2: Fetch your data
kindle highlights update
The update sub-command uses either the passed in credentials or the saved credentials in the settings file and reaches out to Amazon’s Kindle highlights website. It slurps all the highlights (and book info) and saves it in a SQLite3 database in ~/.kindle.
kindle highlights updateThe update command will take a while to run, depending on how many highlights you have. Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem to do anything. That’s okay. Trust in the UNIX-way.
Step 3: Output your data
kindle highlights
The highlights command requires a sub-command to generate the appropriate output. Currently the available output formats are: JSON, CSV, and Markdown.
Example with JSON:
# Output in json format and redirect to highlights.json file
kindle highlights json > highlights.jsonExample with CSV:
# Output in csv format and redirect to highlights.csv file
kindle highlights csv > highlights.csvExample with Markdown:
# Output in markdown format and redirect to highlights.md file
kindle highlights markdown > highlights.mdAdvanced Topic: The Console
I’ve also included a console command for those of you familiar with Ruby on Rails, irb, etc. Issuing the kindle console command will open a console session with two ActiveRecord objects: Book and Highlight. These are real ActiveRecord v5.0 models pointing to the database of highlights.
kindle console examples:
Kindle :) Book.count
=> 45
Kindle :) Highlight.count
=> 587
Kindle :) Highlight.first
=> #<Kindle::Models::Highlight:0x007fd43a50ae90
id: 1,
highlight: "riparian",
amazon_id: nil,
book_id: 1,
created_at: 2016-07-01 00:18:32 UTC,
updated_at: 2016-07-01 00:18:32 UTC>
Kindle :) Book.first
=> #<Kindle::Models::Book:0x007fd43a591800
id: 1,
asin: "B004J4WN0I",
title: "Hounded (with two bonus short stories): The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book One",
author: "by Kevin Hearne",
highlight_count: 8,
created_at: 2016-07-01 00:18:32 UTC,
updated_at: 2016-07-01 00:18:32 UTC>Endcap
In case you are too lazy to open the LICENSE file, just FYI this is all MIT licensed.
© 2012-2016 Matt Petty @lodestone