Kindle clippings to markdown files (Instapaper friendly) - WIP

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Warning: this is a work in progress tailored for my specific workflow, so expect bugs.

I’ve been working on a program to turn my kindle highlights and notes into obsidian friendly markdown files. I also use Instapaper to save articles and have them sent to my kindle as a digest. This program also parses through the Instapaper digest clippings to create separate markdown files for each article in the digest.

The project can be found here. It can definitely improve a ton, but it works well enough for me. I’m hoping to make it more extensible so that others can play around with it. I just recently saw another forum post that can do something similar here which probably works better than my solution. The only advantage to mine would be for those that use instapaper and want a separate markdown file per article (instead of one markdown file per digest which could contain multiple articles).

I hope people find this helpful :slight_smile:

Cheers

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This looks nice and may end up being better than Fyodor since you are making it with Obsidian specifically.

Thanks for sharing it.

I unfortunately couldn’t get it to run and I’m not much of a programmer.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "kindle-to-markdown.py", line 323, in <module>
    main()
  File "kindle-to-markdown.py", line 298, in main
    noteClip = GetNoteClip(clipping)
  File "kindle-to-markdown.py", line 66, in GetNoteClip
    position = numbers[0]
IndexError: list index out of range
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it might have something to do with how your kindle formats notes in your clippings. When I make a note on my kindle, it looks like this in My Clippings.txt:

Instapaper: Wednesday, Dec. 2nd (Instapaper)
- Your Note on Location 505 | Added on Thursday, December 3, 2020 7:16:57 PM

Check how notes are formatted in your clippings file, because what should be happening is that the program looks for the word “Location” then takes the first number that occurs after it (in the above case it would be 505). If the word “Location” isn’t there, then you’d probably get a bug

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Also, as long as highlights and notes are together in a markdown file it’s obsidian friendly, so if fyodor works for you, I’d suggest using that. The only difference with mine is that I’m trying to make it work for my article reading workflow as well (with Instapaper).