Easily submit your Kobo highlights to Readwise (and eventually more)
A small Wails application for syncing your highlights with Readwise.
Kobo eReaders are somewhat notorious for not being user friendly to extract highlights off of. Personally I only send mine to Readwise anyway so this tool does just that in as little as two clicks.
Eventually, if I get around to it, I plan to allow exporting your Kobo database to disc and to various formats if that's useful.
For now, I just use the Readwise functionality the most.
While the first release is published, and visually it's fairly polished, the codebase is a bit messier than I'd like.
To reflect that, I haven't published v1.0.0 just yet but it's good enough to use (and I do use it regularly) so feel free to file any issues you run into.
You can track the progress towards v1.0.0 here.
For now, the installation process is pretty barebones. You can find a range of releases under the releases tab.
For macOS, both platform specific (Intel and macOS Silicon) builds are available as well as a slightly larger Universal binaries. If in doubt, just pick the universal dmg but if you prefer, you can save a bit of space with a platform specific build.
It's also worth nothing that the mac apps are notarised with my developer certificate so you shouldn't have to go through the quarantine process anymore.
For Windows, an amd64 (x86/Intel) build is available which most will be what most Windows users will want to use. An arm64 build is available as well although I don't know that anyone really uses Windows ARM but it's cheap to compile.
You'll also need to allow Microsoft Edge WebView 2 to be installed if you aren't running Windows 11. Windows 11 ships with it included but older versions of Windows will need to install it. You don't have to do anything additional, October will prompt you to install it the first time you start up October. It's a one time thing as October uses WebView2 to display its UI.
For Linux users, Wails is just in the final phases of polishing up initial Linux support.
A Linux build should be available not too long from now, although I still need to figure out how to do packaging.
Until then, here's a sneak peek. I've successfully used the dev build to upload highlights :)
The scope of October is pretty small.
To get started, you'll need to get your Readwise access token from https://readwise.io/access_token.
Once you've done that, navigate to the Settings page (after selecting your Kobo), save it once and then navigate back to Overview to use the sync functionality.
Your token will be saved locally so you only need to provide it once.
Under the hood, I use pgaskin's koboutils library.
It doesn't support the Sage, Libra 2 or Elipsa however so I've hacked in support temporarily as I got a Libra 2 recently.
It should all work the same but buyer beware and all that. October never writes to your Kobo, just reads so you should be perfectly safe.
If you're running into issues, feel free to open a Github issue although support is best effort.
For specific issues, I'll likely ask for a copy of your logs to help with debugging.
October saves logs in the following places:
- Windows:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\october\logs - macOS:
$HOME/Library/Application Support/october/logs - Linux:
$HOME/.local/share/october/logs(unreleased)
Your config file, currently just containing your Readwise token, is stored in the following places:
- Windows:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\october\config.json - macOS:
$HOME/Library/Application Support/october/config.json - Linux:
$HOME/.config/october/config.json(unreleased)
Given that, if you set custom XDG locations, October should honour them out of the box.
Device selection
Device overview
Device settings
Device selection
Device overview
Found October useful? Like most organisms, I have a crippling addition.
Actually, that's not true! I think coffee is overrated but I still enjoy the taste which a lot of people find odd.
Anyway, it's up to you. October will always be open source and never monetised but the social validation gets me going :)
There are some links in the sidebar you can use.
First and foremost, this project only lives thanks to the continuing efforts of Lea Anthony and the Wails project.
The first iteration of this project died (of author burnout) from battling too much with Electron, getting it to integrate nicely with sqlite3 libraries and while trying to adhere to the security model.
In comparison, Wails (especially v2!) has been a lot more fun and gave this project a second life.
With stumbling across it, I probably would've given up entirely!
Base assets:
- Octopus and glasses icons from Google's Noto Emoji project
- Used under the SIL Open Font License, visible under assets/LICENSE
- Mashup generated by Google Keyboard's Emoji Kitchen
- The end result does not directly use images from the
noto-emojirepo but does indirectly through Google Keyboard, so the SIL Open Font License is understood to still apply.
- Book image from Merlin2525
- Base image released under Public Domain by author and colour swapped from red to blue
- Final logo compiled from the above assets by The Oligopolist.
- As a derivation of assets released under the SIL Open Font License, the same license still applies to the end result.