Export Kindle highlights to Roam, grouping them by books.
KindRoam is for people who:
- usually read books or articles not purchased through Amazon and
- want to import their Kindle highlights in Roam and
- don't want to pay for Readwise just to do this.
Kindle highlights can be accessed at read.amazon.com but only for books that
were bought in the Kindle store. If you use something like Instapaper or import
your ebooks by email or USB, your highlights are only accessible through
a file called My Clippings.txt inside your Kindle. That makes it extremely
annoying if you want to use your highlights as a starting point for a book
summary or re-read them without having to click through the ebook.
There is an app called Readwise that offers the feature of exporting Kindle
highlights by directly parsing My Clippings.txt but it is a paid app.
It offers great features but if you want to keep your toolbox small and
focused on Roam, it might not make sense to pay only for the exporting.
KindRoam exports Kindle highlights into Roam pages, grouping them by book and writting them as Markdown files. It keeps track of the last time the highlights were exported so only the newest ones are used.
When importing an already existing page, Roam appends the new data, so KindRoam makes sure to only export highlights that have not been written before.
The Markdown files are written to a folder and they can be directly
imported to Roam. Each book gets its own Roam page. After importing the
highlights, the files can be deleted manually or using the clean
command. It is recommended to import all generated Roam pages before
doing a new export because books with new highlights will be overwritten.
Kindle offers the feature of adding notes to a highlight. Unfortunately,
they are not distinguishable from normal highlights in My Clippings.txt.
To get around this, you can mark your notes with an initial + so kindroam
recognizes them and attaches them as a sub-block. For example, if your note is
This highlight is important to me., it needs to be +This highlight is important to me. so it can become a sub-block.
When Roam imports Markdown files, all the sub-blocks are collapsed. You can
expand them all by right-clicking the page title and selecting Expand All.
To install the command-line tool, run:
pip install .
After this, kindroam is available as a CLI.
To export highlights from a My Clippings.txt file, use the export
command. If you are using OSX and have your Kindle plugged in, you
can run:
kindroam export
Otherwise, you need to specify where the My Clippings.txt file is with
the -f/--filename option:
kindroam export -f "My Clippings.txt"
The created Roam pages are exported to the folder books in the project
directory. They are ready to be used with the Import feature in Roam.