Klipbook

Klipbook takes the highlights and notes that you've created on your Kindle and outputs them into nice html or JSON.

An example of a html clippings file generated by Klipbook

Example
of a clippings file

What sources does it support?

Klipbook can take your highlights from a clippings file off a physical Kindle device or from the Kindle highlights site itself.

When should I use the file and when should I use the site?

If your books are purchased from Amazon directly then use the site. The site is the canonical source and will contain all of your notes and highlights from across all of your Kindle devices and applications. Currently the Amazon highlights site only shows clippings for books you've purchased on Amazon.

If your books are personal documents and you've read them on your Kindle device itself then you should use the file from that device as a source i.e. your Kindle device only keeps clippings that you made directly on it.

How does it work?

Klipbook supports three commands: list, tohtml, and tojson.

To HTML

tohtml retrieves the clippings from your latest annotated books and writes them out into a pretty html file for each book.

From a file

Copy your clippings file (called "My Clippings.txt" on a 3rd generation Kindle) from your Kindle device to your local drive via USB.

Then write out a list of your clippings via:

$ klipbook tohtml -i "My Clippings.txt"

This command will write the collected clippings for the latest annotated book to a file in the current directory. You can override the output directory with the --outdir switch.

You can also specify a maximum count of books you'd like collated with the --number switch.

Klipbook will not overwrite an exiting file by default. You can change this with the --force flag.

From the site

Specify your Amazon credentials to klipbook and it will scrape the site and output a clippings file.

$ klipbook tohtml -c [email protected]:my-password

The same flags above apply.

Note that the scraping requires a network connection (obviously) and can take a while so please be patient.

Set up defaults

If you don't feel like having your Amazon credentials in your shell history you can set your default source in the klipbook rc file: ~/.klipbookrc.

This is simply a YAML file and you can specify default values for the source and the output directory, e.g.

$ cat ~/.klipbookrc

:credentials: [email protected]:my-password
:outdir: /path/to/my/default/output/directory

Command line options override the defaults stored in the rc file.

List

The list command lists the books available in the specified source.

$ klipbook list -i "My Clippings.txt"

Book list:
[1] The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
[2] How to jump out of a plane without a parachute and survive by Rip Rockjaw

By default it will only list the latest book. This can be overrided with the --number switch.

To JSON

tojson pulls together the clippings from your latest annotated books and combines them into a single JSON file.

$ klipbook tojson -i "My Clippings.txt" -o books.json

You can rerun tojson on an existing JSON file to add new books. By default existing books in the JSON file will not be overwritten. This can be changed with the --force flag.

Installation

Klipbook is a Ruby gem. To install simply run:

$ gem install klipbook

Supported Devices

Klipbook has been tested on clippings files from 3rd generation Kindles and the Kindle Touch.

Tested platforms

Klipbook has been tested on Mac OSX Mavericks using Ruby 2.1.2.

Contributing to Klipbook

Fork the project on Github, add tests for your changes, and submit a well described pull request.