57uff3r / ibooks_notes_exporter

ibooks-notes-exporter

People remember less than 20% of what they read if they are not taking notes. That's why it's always a good idea to take notes while you are reading. But if you are reading in iBooks and taking notes there, it's very hard to get them out of that app. You have to manually copy-paste quotes and your thoughts. ibooks-notes-exporter solves that problem. it's a little program that gets all your notes and highlights from iBooks and exports them into markdown.

Note! ibooks-notes-exporter can only extract notes from EPUB files.

Installation

ibooks-notes-exporter is available on OS X (both Intel and M-series processors). It's distributed via a homebrew package manager.

Run these commands in your terminal

> brew tap 57uff3r/mac-apps
> brew install 57uff3r/mac-apps/ibooks_notes_exporter

Usage

First of all, you have to get a list of all your books with notes and highlights.

❯ ibooks_notes_exporter books
+----------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| SINGLEBOOK ID                    | NUMBER OF NOTES | TITLE AND AUTHOR                                                                 |
+----------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 4BAE5DA3C95788753173EAE8C63E6034 |               1 | Lorem impsum — John Doe                                                          |
| 7C3FA4F94689D97444BB4E0FD97D7197 |              54 | Hamlet — william shakespeare                                                     |
+----------------------------------+-----------------+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

And then you can export all your notes from the book into a markdown file.

ibooks_notes_exporter export --book_id 4BAE5DA3C95788753173EAE8C63E6034 > ./LoremImpsum.md

You also can export your notes partially by skipping first X notes:

ibooks_notes_exporter export --book_id 4BAE5DA3C95788753173EAE8C63E6034 --skip_first_x_notes 20 > ./LoremImpsum.md 

In this example, the exporter will skip first 20 notes and export the rest.

Feedback and contribution

Your feedback and pull requests are much appreciated. Feel free to send your comments and thoughts to [e-mail]

Changelog

0.0.5

• New CLI syntax
• --skip_first_x_notes flag
• Fix for Issue #5 ('some bug in chinese book')

0.0.4

Fix for long titles made by @NSBum

0.0.3

Bug fix: worng order of notes and highlights. Quick and dirty fix, better solution requires to implement a parser for ISO/IEC 23736-6:2020 standard (EPUB Canonical Fragment Identifier or epubcfi) and this will be done in next versions.

0.0.2

Markdown fix: missing line break

0.0.1

Initial release