So, you’ve finally given in and bought a Kindle! And I completely understand—it’s much more enjoyable to read on a screen designed for that purpose than on a tablet or smartphone that can strain your eyes. Plus, there are no distractions; you can fully focus on your reading, away from social media and annoying notifications. In short, it’s pure bliss for avid book lovers like you and me.
However, you’ve gotten into the habit of highlighting passages and frantically jotting down notes during your reading sessions. These little notes and personal reflections are a goldmine! It would be great to easily retrieve them on your PC to do something with them—like organizing, sharing, or integrating them into your content. Essentially, you don’t want all that analytical and memorization work to go to waste.
Fortunately, I found a handy little script via Lorenper that will make your life easier: Readwire. Developed by someone named Veebch, this simple piece of code will quickly extract your Kindle annotations and transfer them to your PC. Plus, it organizes everything neatly into a clean file, free of duplicates, ready to use. Magic!
So, how does this little script work? It couldn’t be simpler:
- Connect your Kindle to your PC via a USB cable (yes, just like in the Middle Ages, but retro can be good sometimes). Make sure your PC detects the device; otherwise, things could get tricky…
- Open a terminal (or Command Prompt for those allergic to English) and navigate to the directory where you want to store your precious literary bounty.
- Run
git clone https://github.com/veebch/readwire.gitto download the script files, then navigate into the folder withcd readwire. - Now, unleash the magic with a good old
python3 monitor.pyand let it do its thing!
And voilà, a few seconds later, you’ll find a file named My_Clippings.txt containing all your favorite annotations, along with a clippings_parsed.tsv file that neatly organizes those same annotations in a table, ready for word processing or spreadsheets. Clean, tidy, and flawless.
Bonus for the tech-savvy who don’t want to run the command every time: You can set up udev rules so that the script runs automatically whenever you connect your Kindle.
Here’s how to do it:
- Install udev if you haven’t already (e.g.,
sudo apt-get install udevon Ubuntu). - Create a new rules file in
/etc/udev/rules.d/named99-readwire.rules. - Add the following lines to that file:
ACTION=="add", SUBSYSTEM=="usb", ATTR{idVendor}=="1949", ATTR{idProduct}=="0004", RUN="/usr/bin/python /path/to/readwire/monitor.py"(replace/path/to/readwire/with the path to the directory where you cloned the repository). - Reload the udev rules with
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules.
And there you go! Plug in your Kindle and watch the magic happen—it works automatically! Technology really is beautiful.
Your valuable annotations are now saved, sorted, and ready to be reused in various ways. Whether you want to import them into Obsidian, Notion, Logseq, or simply read them comfortably in LibreOffice, you now have a solid and well-organized foundation.
Plus, it’s open source, lightweight, and at least works on Linux (for macOS and Windows, that’s to be verified).
Well, I’ll leave you to it—my Kindle is waiting for me for another round of intense highlighting!
