monking / kindle-clippings

Parse Kindle's "My Clippings.txt" into JSON

Kindle Clippings

Convert "My Clippings.txt" to JSON format.

What is this?

If you have a classic Kindle, you can highlight sections of text when reading. Those highlights are stored on the Kindle in a file called "My Clippings.txt".

This script converts the data in that file to JSON format, for ease of browsing.

How to run?

Python 3.7.3

python clippings.py [-i <input filename> -o <output filename>]

If you do not supply <input filename>, the script defaults to "in/My Clippings.txt" which assumes you have a directory called "in" inside the directory where you put clippings.py.

If you do not supply <output filename>, the script defaults to "out/clippings.json" which assumes you have a directory called "out" inside the directory where you put clippings.py.

Warning! The script will overwrite <output filename> without warning.

Output file is in the format:

{
    "<author>": {
        "<title>" {
            "<location/page>" : [
                {
                    "date": "YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM",
                    "quote": "<quote text>"
                }
            ]
        }
    }
}

Double quote marks within a quote are prefaced with a backslash, otherwise the JSON would be invalid.

Quotes without an author are stored under the dummy author name ZZNOAUTHOR.

How to get Kindle clippings when the connection is dodgy

My kindle is old. It sometimes doesn't connect to my computer for long enough to allow me to manually copy "My Clippings.txt". You can get around this. On Windows machines, do the following:

1. Plug in kindle
2. Open command prompt cmd.exe
3. Type "E:\documents\My Clippings.txt" (or whichever drive letter your kindle is under)
4. Save the file that opens (should open with your default text editor)