Chrome Extension: amaJSON: Export Notes From Kindle Books as JSON

- 2 minutes read - 287 words

TL; DR

I have written and extension for the Chrome browser that allows you to visit your Notes and Highlights (https://read.amazon.com/notebook) page and export a given book’s notes and annotations as JSON.

AmaJson Chrome Extension Page

From This…

Visit a book’s note page and right-click a menu

AmaJson Chrome Extension Page

To a Clipboard With This…

{
  "title": "A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age",
  "author": "Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman",
  "highlightCount": 65,
  "noteCount": 7,
  "annotations": [
    {
      "highlight": "But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits.",
      "location": 69,
      "annotation": ""
    }
    ...
  ]
}
    {

Motivation

I like to read books on Amazon Kindle. It’s a great device, especially for subway riders. I often find myself highlighting text as a marker for comprehension or for denoting good ideas. Less often I add a note to a highlight, but I’ve found that this practice keeps me engaged in the text.

However when you add highlights or notes while using the device they remain locked up in the Amazon ecosystem. I’d really like to have my notes in a format where I could search the text with a tool like grep or in a format which I could then import to a database.

Even if you’re not a technologist, notes stored in a format like the following is probably useful.

Conclusion

If you read and annotate on Kindle, please try this out and help me see whether this is something that can benefit others in addition to myself.