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E-Ink with an API

Tinkering with web pages to get your notes.

TL;DR

There's a web page you can use to copy notes and highlightes you made on your Kindle into other apps. If you're crafty, you could even hack a little code to do it for you automatically.

Connecting The Dots

A discord question sparked my interest:

Is there a good workflow for using a Kindle with the Obsidian notes app?

I did some basic note/highlight syncing years ago. It involved plugging my Kindle into a computer with a USB cable and writing little apps to dig out the content.

It was a pain. I never did it.

What About Now?

I love taking notes. Figuring out a way to sync them from my Kindle to my Grimoiregrim has been simmering on my brain's back-burner for years.

It's a super appealing idea. I would even read more if I could get my notes to migrate.

This is what I found after taking a look around with fresh eyes:

  • There does not appear to be a public APIapi that provides access to notes/highlights remotely.

  • There are some projects floating around that connect to Amazon's private APIs.

    I won't link to those for two reasons:

    1. They almost certainly break the terms of service, and.
    2. The main one I see doesn't provide access to notes/highlights.

  • Amazon has a page where you can view your notesnotepage.

    The Amazon Notebooks webpage showing a list of books with their covers going down the left sidebar of the image and collection of notes in the main content area. The top book is Agency by William Gibson. Highlights from it make up the main portion of the page.

Copy/Pasta Robot

That page offers two solutions for moving your notes into your notebook:

  1. Manually copy/paste each item.
  2. Build a robot to do it for you.

I prefer the second.

Scraping 101

Apps that copy content off a web page are called Web Scrapersws. They're fragile and hacky. They're often also the only way to access information automatically.

Here's a view of the page with a developer's consoledev to give you an idea of how they work.

A view of the Amazon Notebooks page with a Developer's Console open below it. The console shows various chunks of code including the highlighted text: The sky agove the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. The same line of text is highlighted on the page itself with dotted blue grid lines surrounding it.

The highlighted text in the lower left panel (THE SKY ABOVE the port...) is the snippet from the raw source codesc that places it on the page above (where it's also highlighted inside the dotted blue lines).

That source code is the internal version of the page the browser maintains in order to render what we humans actually see. That internal version can also be used by browser extensions and pluginsext. That's the way to a solution.

I don't have the spoons to write one now. When I do, that's how I'll go about it.

-a

-- end of line --

Endnotes

I saw a few things that looked like they might already do this. They were old though. Web scrapers only work as long as the layout of the page they are scraping doesn't change. I wouldn't expect anything that's not kept up to date to do anything useful.

There are a few other E Ink readers out there besides Kindles. You can even build one yourself if you're into that type of thing. None of them will have access to your Kindle books though. Amazon keeps them locked down.

It sucks, but they got me.

Scraping a single piece of content of a basic web page is pretty easy in terms of programming tasks. Getting notes from the Amazon page would be a bigger ask.

For example, you have to figure out pagination to get to jump through your books and get all the notes. You'd also want something in place to make sure you didn't copy over the same note multiple times.

This post doesn't discuss where you copy your notes too. Some apps like Obsidian would be easy based off the way they're set up. Other apps could prove to be harder to get stuff in than it is to get out of Amazon.

Footnotes

grim ⤴

Some folks call it a notes app. I call it a book of magic.

api ⤴

"API" is the technical term for the ways computers are set up to talk to each other automatically.

notepage ⤴

If you're logged in, you should see your books. YMMV if you're not.

ws ⤴

"Web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction is data scraping used for extracting data from websites."

dev ⤴
Developer Tools

Most browsers offer a "Developer mode". Turning it on give you access to tools to see behind the scenes. They incredibly useful for building sites and pages. They're also handy for looking to see how other things are built and figuring out what you can do with them.

sc ⤴
Source Code

Source code is a broad term used to describe the files written in various programming languages that computers use as instructions to tell them what to do.

ext ⤴

Plugin and extensions are little apps that you can install inside a browser to change their functionality in some way. They're a great