It's a small script written in Python which exports highlights, bookmarks and notes from the given book file to the desired output format.
Every note, highlight, and a bookmark are saved locally to your Kindle device in a file named My Clippings.txt, or something similar. That file has a specific format which enables easy parsing of desired data. The Script will take this file, parse it, and output data in one of the supported output formats.
My Clippings.txt looks something likes this:
The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael)
- Your Bookmark on Location 111 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2015 7:26:42 PM
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The Intelligent Investor, Rev. Ed (Graham, Benjamin;Jason Zweig;Warren E. Buffett)
- Your Bookmark on Location 6152 | Added on Monday, August 10, 2015 8:06:01 PM
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael)
- Your Bookmark on Location 289 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2015 4:49:23 PM
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael)
- Your Bookmark on Location 607 | Added on Tuesday, August 11, 2015 5:19:06 PM
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael)
- Your Highlight on Location 718-718 | Added on Wednesday, August 12, 2015 7:17:46 AM
perspiration, the perspiration was the process of incrementally
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The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (Burger, Edward B.;Starbird, Michael)
- Your Bookmark on Location 897 | Added on Wednesday, August 12, 2015 7:33:04 AM
==========
- TeX (LaTeX)
- Given .tex template file, it will export data in the latex file which can be easily converted to a PDF file.
- For converting tex to PDF take a look at this
- Markdown
- Given .md template file, it will fill the template with given data from the book.
- Plain Text
- Exports in plain .txt format.
- Plug your Kindle into the computer
- Open mounted Kindle directory and navigate to documents folder
- My Clippings.txt should be there, just copy it somewhere on your computer and run the script
After you clone the repository, you will see the export.py script in the root of the project. Run it with:
python3 export.py --input-log [/My/Clippings/path] --output-dir [/export/directory] --templates-dir [templates/]
After you run it, it will scan the document and interactively ask you what data you would like to export and in which format.
You can run python3 export.py -h to show the help menu.
You have to set the templates folder directory when running the script. You can take a look at example templates in the templates directory if you wish to create your own templates. You DO NOT need a template file when using the plain text format.
When creating your own templates, add .tex/.md/.txt extensions at the end of the template file name or the template won't be recognised.
The start and the finish date of reading are dates when the first and the last bookmarks in the book were made.
You can see some of the exported examples in the examples directory.
The only requirement is Python3 (tested on Python 3.5.2)
The script was tested on Kindle Paperwhite generation 5. I don't know how other versions of Kindle devices save this sort of data (I assume it's not very different from this one), but feel free to open a bug issue you find some differences on other Kindle devices.