I know this is off topic, but anything that works well with Apple Books app?
Not really. About the best you can do is to view your particular book’s highlights in Books, and then Select All > Share and either email the highlights to yourself, or save them to iCloud, Notes, etc…
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revisiting this. The whole extract DB data out is painful if you’ve got encryption turned on on the iPad for backups. Youa vhe to stop encryption, do a backup then turn it back on.
The idea of the kindlequotes script is interesting but there isn’t a MyClippings file on the iPad.
Quotes and clippings created in books you email to your kindle app do seem to be in the Amazon highlight file but then the only way out is Readwise and your data is all on their cloud.
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Is it just me who’s afraid of keeping all my highlights and notes in readwise? It seems really powerful, and can resurface things in the future, which I think is great, but what if I want to store my entire readwise database in DEVONthink, for example? Does anyone else do that? Is there a good workflow for that?
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Nope, you are not the only one. Which is why I haven’t even touched Readwise after my initial test and why I am still searching for a way to capture and save Kindle highlights from ALL my kindle format books, even those I do not get from Amazon.
Edited to Add:
NOTE: I said Kindle FORMAT books. I do not use a Kindle device to read. I use the apps available for the iPad and Mac. Primarily the iPad. SO options that depend on a Kindle device ( and specifically the easy accessibility of the MyClippings.txt file) will not work.
This might help folks looking to extract kindle highlights.
I wanted to generate markdown files that I could index from DEVONthink, so I made the changes to Duarte’s script.
Here it is -
My script generates markdown files in a folder that is indexed by DEVONthink. This only works with connecting the kindle to the Mac. It looks for the My Clippings.txt in the current directory. I have a symbolic link to /Volumes/Kindle/documents/My Clippings.txt in my books read folder.
11685 Hirendras-MacBook-Pro[01/13/21]:~/personal/booksread
-->ls -l
drwxr-xr-x - hiren 23 Dec 2020 books
.rwxr-xr-x@ 3.4k hiren 21 Dec 2020 kindle_highlights.py
lrwxr-xr-x 42 hiren 14 Oct 2020 My Clippings.txt -> /Volumes/Kindle/documents/My Clippings.txt
When you run kindle_highlights.py, it generates the markdown files in the books folder.
Unfortunately there is no My Clipppings.txt file when you use the Kindle apps like an iPad or Mac. In previous threads there is a way to locate the database, convoluted and difficult, but it also contains all tehhighlights anyone has put in the book and it seems that even if you turn off the selecton to show ppoular highlights they confound your database data.
So while that will work great for anyone using an actual Kindle device it leave the rest of us out cold.
Readwise, in my recent experience, has excellent export. I was scraping the highlights myself with a script into drafts, but there was no way to order them or know which chapter they came from. Readwise has a great way of generating a TOC from a kindle book (takes small effort on your part–you have to highlight and note all the headings). Export to Roam or markdown or csv and it doesn’t matter if Readwise shuts down or whatever.
Look earlier up in the thread. Readwise does not capture kindle highlighhts from books not purchased from Amazon without jumping multiple other hoops.
It’s also cloud based and again, up thread I said why a cloud solution is not really a good option for me.
So I reiterate - There is no good way to get kindle highlights out of the kindle app on iPad or Mac for all Kindle format books that is local only.
Have you tried Bookcision? It is maintained by Readwise, but it does not require a Readwise account, and it does not rely on My Clippings.txt. I do not read books that I did not purchase from Amazon only in the macOS and iOS Kindle apps, so I don’t know for certain that it works.
When you say, “Kindle format”, do you mean AZW3? Are the books available in other formats supported by other ebook software?
EDIT: I do see Bookcision mentioned up the thread, but I did not see you indicate whether you’d tried it.
This is what I use. I download all of my annotations and notes for each book I read and archive those in DEVONthink, where I can use them for writing projects. It works perfectly for my use case.
Yes I did look at Bookcision. That does not solve the problem. It suffers from basically everything that is the issue with Readwise in terms of real functionaliy. Here are the issues
Does notwork on iPad OS as far as I can tell.
Requires that you use Chrome to get the highlights off
Only downloads the highlights that are on the Amazon web site which again is only for books purchased via Amazon or books you send to kindle via Amazon.
I mean books in .mobi format which is how nearly all of my externally purchased books come in as.
Examples include nearly all free books, anything I purchased direct from Tor or Take Control or LeanPub, lots of first time author books especially mystery, science fiction and thriller books that authors either sell direct or offer free because it’s the first of a series and they want to get you hooked and so on.
My normal method for those books is download them to my Mac and then move the .mobi files over to the iPad placing them in the Kindle folder there.
Some are but that’s even worse. The other format is for the Book app in apple and it’s horrible for reading IMO.
Do you ever buy books from places that are not Amazon?
The annotations are still all located on Amazon’s cloud system even if you can get a copy off there with Bookcision.
Sorry, I thought that highlights on non-Amazon books were still available on the Amazon webpage.
Given your constraints, I suspect your best–and possibly only–option is to find an ebook app that reads .mobi and allows you to export the highlights. If you are unwilling to convert your Amazon purchases to another format and remove the DRM, that does leave you reading your books in multiple apps.
Kindle app in iOS also have an option to export highlights as email. It is sent as a html file which you can open and print. You have to do one by one, even .doc file uploaded into Kindle.
Exporting highlights by email is not a option for me, I only get the option to export to Flashcards. Is there a setting somewhere that needs to be set to enable exporting by email?
I found that any book you added by moving it rather than via Amazon delivery you cannot export highlights via email at all and the option is only make flashcards
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What other apps to read kindle formatted books on iPad? (and yes I do have a lot of AZW formats as well just more of the ones not from Amazon are .MOBI) a quick search in the iOS app store only found apps that also have their own captive libraries and most of them are romantic novels or kids books or classics out of copyright.
Multiple apps are in general an issue. Mostly because if I ahave notes and annotations in one app (which I do for some books) I don’t want to lose them.
Nope, not as a general rule. I had found that I could often get the highlights and annotatiosn to work if I did the send to kindle with the file but I have since discovered that it’s not always working.
I used to use Marvin for epub, but it hasn’t been updated in a long time. I’ve been doing most of my reading on Kindle lately.
KyBook 3 is well-reviewed and seems to have the feature set you are looking for. I’m guessing, though, that you’ll be stuck in two apps unless you jump through some hoops to convert your Amazon-purchased books and remove the DRM.