Fyodor

Convert your Amazon Kindle highlights, notes and bookmarks into markdown (or any format).

What is Fyodor

This application parses My Clippings.txt from your Kindle and generates a markdown file for each book/document, in the format #{Author} - #{Title}.md. This way, your annotations are conveniently stored and easily managed.

For samples of the output, click here.

To read more about the motivation and what problem it tries to solve, check this blog post.

Features

• Supports all the type of entries in your clippings file: highlights, notes, clips and bookmarks.
• Automatic removal of empty or duplicate entries (the clippings file can get a lot of those).
• Orders your entries by location/page on each book (the clippings file is ordered by time).
• Easily configurable for your language, allowing you to get all features and beautiful output.
• This software goes some length to be locale agnostic: basic parsing should work without configuration for any language. It should also work even if your clippings file has multiple locales.
• By default, output in a format that is clean and easy to edit/fiddle around: markdown.
• Bookmarks are placed together and notes are formatted differently, for better visualization.
• Entirely customizable output, in the format you prefer, through templates.
• Customizable file names.

This program is based on the clippings file generated by Kindle 2019, but should work with other models.

Limitations

We are limited by the data Kindle makes available through My Clippings.txt. This means:

• We don't have chapter information.
• We can’t guess all entries that were deleted.

Installation

Install Ruby and run:

$ gem install fyodor

Updating

Run:

$ gem update fyodor

Configuration

Fyodor reads an optional configuration file at ~/.config/fyodor/fyodor.toml or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fyodor/fyodor.toml. This section describes the available parameters (none is required).

To download the default configuration:

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rc2dev/fyodor/master/share/defaults/fyodor.toml --create-dirs -o ~/.config/fyodor/fyodor.toml

Languages

If your Kindle device is not set to English (US), you should tell Fyodor how some things are named on your My Clippings.txt (highlights, pages, etc). I went through some length to make Fyodor work regardless of this step. However, if you don't set this correctly, you won't take advantage of many features, resulting in a dirtier output.

Open both fyodor.toml and your My Clippings.txt in your preferred editor. Change the values in the [parser] section to mirror what you get in My Clippings.txt.

For example, this is the configuration for Brazilian Portuguese:

[parser]
highlight = "Seu destaque"
note = "Sua nota"
bookmark = "Seu marcador"
clip = "Recortar este artigo"
loc = "posição"
page = "página"
time = "Adicionado:"

Change output file names

By default, Fyodor writes the output files in the format %{author_fill} - %{title}.md. You can change that by setting filename under [output]. For example, for HTML extension and to only display the title of the book:

[output]
filename = "%{title}.html"

Available variables:

• %{author}: Author of the book.
• %{author_fill}: Author of the book. If empty, shows "Author Not Available".
• %{title}: Title of the book.

Templating

You may change the structure of the files output by Fyodor by providing your own template in any format you wish.

To do that, place a ERB template at ~/.config/fyodor/template.erb or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/fyodor/template.erb and Fyodor will use it automatically.

The default template can be found here. You can use any method or attribute available on this class.

If you use a format other than markdown, you'll want to change the files extension. To do this, refer to the corresponding section.

Usage

$ fyodor CLIPPINGS_FILE [OUTPUT_DIR]

Where:

• CLIPPINGS_FILE is the path for My Clippings.txt.
• OUTPUT_DIR is the directory to write the output files. If none is supplied, this will be fyodor_output under the current directory.

PSA: HTML to markdown

Did you export your annotations to HTML using the Kindle mobile app?

You can convert it to markdown with a script I wrote specifically for it.

Buy me a coffee

If you like Fyodor, you can show your support here:

License

Licensed under GPLv3

Copyright (C) 2019-2022 Rafael Cavalcanti