kindle-highlights: A Ruby repository from ixil

kindle-highlights

A Ruby gem for collecting your Kindle highlights.

Requirements

Ruby 2.1.0 or greater
An Amazon Kindle account

Install

gem install kindle-highlights

Use

First, require the gem and initialize a new client by passing in the email address & password you use to sign into your Amazon Kindle account:

require 'kindle_highlights'

kindle = KindleHighlights::Client.new(
  email_address: "email.address@gmail.com",
  password: "password"
)

Fetching a list of your Kindle books

Use the books method to get a listing of all your Kindle books. This method returns a collection of KindleHighlights::Book objects:

kindle.books
#=>
[
  <KindleHighlights::Book:
      @asin="B000XUAETY",
      @author="James R. Mcdonough",
      @title="Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat"
  >,
  <KindleHighlights::Book:
    @asin="B003XDUCEU",
    @author="Michael Lopp",
    @title="Being Geek: The Software Developer's Career Handbook"
  >,
  <KindleHighlights::Book:
    @asin="B00JJ1RIO2",
    @author="James K. A. Smith",
    @title="How (Not) to Be Secular: Reading Charles Taylor"
  >
]

Each Book object has it's asin, author, and title as attributes:

book = kindle.books.first
book.asin
#=> "B000XUAETY"
book.author
#=> "James R. Mcdonough"
book.title
#=> "Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat"

Fetching all highlights for a single book

To get only the highlights for a specific book, use the highlights_for method, passing in the book's Amazon ASIN as the only method parameter. This method returns a collection of KindleHighlights::Highlight objects:

kindle.highlights_for("B005CQ2ZE6")
#=>
[
  <KindleHighlights::Highlight:0x007fc4e7e03ea0
    @asin="B005CQ2ZE6",
    @text="One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral.",
    @location="197"
  >
]

Each Highlight object has the book's asin, the text of the highlight, and it's location as attributes:

highlight = kindle.highlights_for("B005CQ2ZE6").first

highlight.asin
#=> "B005CQ2ZE6"
highlight.text
#=> "One of the most dangerous things you can believe in this world is that technology is neutral."
highlight.location
#=> "197"

Additionally, each book has it's own highlights_from_amazon method:

book = kindle.books.first
book.highlights_from_amazon

Advanced Usage

This gem uses mechanize to interact with Amazon's Kindle pages. You can override any of the default mechanize settings (see lib/kindle_highlights/client.rb) by passing your settings to the initializer:

kindle = KindleHighlights::Client.new(
  email_address: "me@example.com",
  password: "amazon_password",
  mechanize_options: { user_agent_alias: 'Mac Safari' }
)

Or you can use read.amazon.com equivalents provided on other TLDs like:

kindle = KindleHighlights::Client.new(
  email_address: "me@example.com",
  password: "amazon_password",\
  root_url: 'https://read.amazon.co.jp'
)

A Note About CAPTCHAs

Amazon will sometimes issue a CAPTCHA challenge when logging in to your Kindle account. If this happens when the gem attempts to log in to your Kindle account to retrieve your book list or highlights, you'll get a KindleHighlights::Client::CaptchaError, like the following:

> kindle.books
KindleHighlights::Client::CaptchaError: Received a CAPTCHA while attempting to sign in to your Amazon account. You will need to resolve this manually at https://www.amazon.com/ap/signin?openid.pape.max_auth_age=0&openid...

There's no way to programmatically resolve this situation. The best solution I've found is to open a browser, visit the URL that the gem returns, log in to your Kindle account, and click around a bit. Then log out of your Kindle account and re-attempt to fetch your highlights via this gem. Additionally, you could try instantiating a new instance of the client and changing the User-Agent via mechanize_options like:

kindle = KindleHighlights::Client.new(
  email_address: "me@example.com",
  password: "amazon_password",
  mechanize_options: { user_agent_alias: 'iPhone' }
)

In The Wild

tobi/highlights - Download your Kindle highlights and email random ones to your inbox

Contributing to kindle-highlights (PRs welcome)

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn't been implemented or the bug hasn't been fixed yet
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn't requested it and/or contributed it
Fork the project
Start a feature/bugfix branch
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
Make sure to add tests for the feature/bugfix. This is important so I don't break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate it to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

ixil/kindle-highlights