Kindle Scribe notebook format

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Is it possible to decode the files containing text notes, highlights, bookmarks (in .sdr folder)?

Yes. See KRDS - A parser for Kindle reader data store files.

The main problem with that approach is that the text being annotated is referenced using "position" numbers. It is not actually included in those files. The actual book files must be used to decode the position and find the referenced text.

The method for doing that varies with different books formats (MOBi, KF8, KFX, etc) and so implementing it would take some work. And a major roadblock to that approach is that most books purchased from Amazon are in KFX format with DRM that cannot be decoded using the DeDRM plugin.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

See KRDS, yet another jhowell masterpiece

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=322172

Thank you!

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jhowell

Yes. See KRDS - A parser for Kindle reader data store files.

The main problem with that approach is that the text being annotated is referenced using "position" numbers. It is not actually included in those files. The actual book files must be used to decode the position and find the referenced text.

The method for doing that varies with different books formats (MOBi, KF8, KFX, etc) and so implementing it would take some work. And a major roadblock to that approach is that most books purchased from Amazon are in KFX format with DRM that cannot be decoded using the DeDRM plugin.

Yes, understood.

However to start with, I am interested in experimenting with Scribe personal documents, which are KFX flavors without DRM (and I expect that will be true of other Kindles at some point). The older formats are becoming less relevant every day.

For Amazon purchases, I propose following experiment: download KFX from Amazon, create some annotations, then swap in KFX converted from AZW3 to see how it picks up the annotations.

Just learning more about how things are put together is of value to me as well.

[jhowell]

I have updated my earlier post describing the strokes contained in Scribe notebooks with additional information learned since it was originally written.

[Jeffrey.]

@jhowell , any update on this? I keep my Scribe offline (I have since initial setup) and I would like to back up and manage all of my notebooks. I have backed up the data for now, hoping there will be a good solution to view entire notebooks on a PC in the future without going through Amazon's servers. For now, when I want to get an image from a notebook I just grab the first page .png. Your solution in the works is much more robust. Thanks for your work on this.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey.

@jhowell , any update on this?

My goal was to better understand the new Scribe technology and data formats. As part of that effort I updated the calibre KFX Input plugin to convert Scribe annotations into EPUBs containing an SVG image for each notebook page or annotation. That is as far as I intend to take this project.

Originally Posted by Jeffrey.

I keep my Scribe offline (I have since initial setup) and I would like to back up and manage all of my notebooks. I have backed up the data for now, hoping there will be a good solution to view entire notebooks on a PC in the future without going through Amazon's servers.

willemml has expressed an interest in developing additional Scribe-related software.

Originally Posted by willemml

Hello, I am trying to write a script that will let me extract PDFs from the Kindle in their annotated form without contacting amazon.

Originally Posted by willemml

In the mean time I am trying to write a program that can convert from PDFs to write-on-able KFX files without going through the Kindle Create software (which for now means I am trying to create my own KPF files from scratch that contain the metadata to correctly map PDF pages) so that I can put them through the KFX Output plugin (which I realize still relies on Kindle Previewer for conversion, but I eventually want to write my own KPF to KFX converter as well.) I will be publishing all code on GitHub as soon as I have something that works a little bit.

You may want to contact willemml for an update.

Added: Here is a link to willemml's GitHub repositories: https://github.com/willemml?tab=repositories