Export Kindle book + highlights to PDF. Possible?

[RS1]

Hi there,

Web searches aren't helping with what I'm trying to do. Hope someone has some insight.

After making highlights and adding notes to a kindle book on a kindle paperwhite, I would like to export it to a PDF so that I can edit it further on my Macbook using the default PDF editor - Mac Preview.

Is there a way of e.g. merging highlights with the book in e.g. Calibre and then exporting it to a reader friendly format in PDF? It sounds like it should be possible, but I haven't been able to find anything at all..

Thanks
RS

[jhowell]

There is a start of something like that here: azw3r highlight and note extraction info

[Ricky D'Angelo]

After signing in to amazon go to ;

https://read.amazon.com/notebook

then copy/paste highlights to document, convert to pdf,etc.

Note: Amazon has set up export limits however something is better than nothing.

[RS1]

Originally Posted by jhowell

There is a start of something like that here: azw3r highlight and note extraction info

Thanks for the link. It seems like it is on the right track, however this thread reads like there are issues?

[RS1]

Originally Posted by Ricky D'Angelo

After signing in to amazon go to ;

https://read.amazon.com/notebook

then copy/paste highlights to document, convert to pdf,etc.

Note: Amazon has set up export limits however something is better than nothing.

Thanks for this. Very useful; however, isn't quite what I'm looking for (list of highlights in book). Rather, I'm looking for a way to superimpose notes and highlights in the book that I can then export to pdf

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by RS1

Thanks for the link. It seems like it is on the right track, however this thread reads like there are issues?

Yes, there are issues. Off the top of my head:

It is not a user-friendly solution. It requires knowledge of developer tools, like sed.

It applies only to AZW3 (KF8) format. Most Kindle devices have their Amazon-sourced books in KFX format these days and while KF8 can be downloaded from Amazon and sideloaded to the Kindle there are disadvantages to doing that.


As I wrote, it is a start. Given that most of the responses so far relate to the technical details of the file format rather than the capabilities of the project I suspect that there is not enough general interest to take this much further.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jhowell

There is a start of something like that here: azw3r highlight and note extraction info

Originally Posted by jhowell

Yes, there are issues. Off the top of my head:

It is not a user-friendly solution. It requires knowledge of developer tools, like sed.

It applies only to AZW3 (KF8) format. Most Kindle devices have their Amazon-sourced books in KFX format these days and while KF8 can be downloaded from Amazon and sideloaded to the Kindle there are disadvantages to doing that.


As I wrote, it is a start. Given that most of the responses so far relate to the technical details of the file format rather than the capabilities of the project I suspect that there is not enough general interest to take this much further.

That thread is not a project to build a highlights/notes exporter but to present some of the information that such a project would need.

The C code is just a hello world example of a program that demonstrates the information is correct, It only needs the azw3r file, nothing else. It does everything I need to deal with a book with 90 highlights and 90 corresponding notes, something excruciatingly painful to me on a Kindle.

The only issue I am aware of is the small (so far unexperienced) chance that it will get confused by the junk between the byte offset to the note and the actual note text.

The perl script is a little tool that I wrote to put the highlights and notes into the rawml for the book. The sed script just modifies the rawml to make it viewable in a web browser. Neither is needed for a notes exporter, I included them in case someone would find them useful. They are a big help for me.

User-friendly is in the eye of the user.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by RS1

After making highlights and adding notes to a kindle book on a kindle paperwhite, I would like to export it to a PDF so that I can edit it further on my Macbook using the default PDF editor - Mac Preview.

Is there a way of e.g. merging highlights with the book in e.g. Calibre and then exporting it to a reader friendly format in PDF? It sounds like it should be possible, but I haven't been able to find anything at all..

Thanks
RS

Originally Posted by jhowell

There is a start of something like that here: azw3r highlight and note extraction info

I think that the azw3r highlight and note extraction scripts have evolved enough to be generally useful to be used to obtain notes and highlights embedded in the text of the book in PDF.

kindleunpack -r book.azw3

makes a hierarchy subdirectories with a bunch of files, including book.rawml

perl azw3r.pl -i book.awz3r | sort -n > book .pnotes
perl notes_insert.pl -n -tag="HL" book.pnotes -r book.rawml -o book-notes-rawml.html

makes a rawml file with embedded highlights and notes. If some of the highlights don't have associated notes, it is a bit more complicated.

ebook-convert book-notes-rawml.html book-notes.pdf

makes the PDF with highlights and notes. There is a kindleunpack pluging for Calibre and the conversion to PDF can be done with the Calibre GUI.