Import highlights directly from Amazon

[carmolim]

Hello! First I would like to congratulate you on the project! I was looking for a project like this for some time now.

I started using it yesterday, and my first suggestion is to allow to import the highlands directly from Amazon. I rarely connect my Kindle on my computer, luckily I had saved on my computer one My Clippings.txt file from some time ago and was able to import some data, but would be a lot easier to get an up to date list directly from Amazon.

I did a quick search and didn't found an API, but there are some other projects her on GitHub that do that (I didn't test) but there are also some commercial tools that do that, so... should be possible.

Thanks in advance!

[mammuth]

Thanks for the feedback.

I think there was a reason to go with the file on the device. But I forgot it 😃

An assumption might be that the online highlights for example don't work for every document type but only for books you bought.

[carmolim]

I only know that the highlights made on personal documents get synced (ios and kindle) but doesn't show on the website: https://read.amazon.com, so I don't know if is possible to retrieve this data or not.

[carmolim]

I think Amazon only syncs the annotations, but sadly they aren't stored on the cloud.

[mammuth]

Thanks for the update. That's a pity.

[chris-wickens]

Does anybody know how Readwise gets the highlights? On there you just connect your Amazon account and it does the rest. Just wondering if it can be replicated here.

[mammuth]

Does anybody know how Readwise gets the highlights? On there you just connect your Amazon account and it does the rest.

Does it? I just tried it and readwise made me install their browser extension which would then extract the highlights from read.amazon.com inside your browser

So it will suffer from the above mentioned limitation where not all types of content appear on read.amazon.com (eg. in my case: I mostly send ebooks to the kindle via email and they get classified as "personal documents". These do not appear on read.amazon.com, and thus, not in readwise)

[chris-wickens]

Thanks for clarifying, I forgot I had an extension installed. I just tested and yes it does appear to need the extension, sorry for misunderstanding.

In my case just being able to automatically fetch books and not highlights would still be useful, but I'm not sure about the feasibility of automating that process without building a similar extension.