Export kindle vocabulary to Markdown

This program (script) is a way to liberate your "Vocabulary Builder" highlights from Kindle.

There are alternatives but my goal here was to export in a way compatible with Obsidian - ie. into a directory of markdown files.

Important: backup the output directory before running

The script shouldn't delete anything, but better safe than sorry!

Usage

1. Connect Kindle with a cable, mount it
2. (Optional) Copy Kindle's database to your drive cp /Volumes/Kindle/system/vocabulary/vocab.db ./vocab.db
3. Run the script with npx @ekamil/kindle-vocab-cli --database ./vocab.db --output ./out
4. Enjoy words and books in the ./out directory

Features

• grabs all words and books from your Kindle vocabulary database
• creates WikiLinks between from words to books
• safe to run repeatedly in the same directory (🤞🏽)

Issues

See issues

⚠️ Unknown how it works with multiple languages and other versions of Kindle. ⚠️

Example output

📂 ./out
┣━━ 📂 books
┃   ┣━━ 📄 A Desolation Called Peace 2 Teixcalaan.md (212 bytes)
┃   ┣━━ 📄 Accelerate The Science of Lean Software and DevOps Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.md (290 bytes)
┃   ┣━━ 📄 All the Birds in the Sky.md (200 bytes)
┃   ┣━━ 📄 Anathem.md (189 bytes)
┃   ┣━━ 📄 Ancillary Justice 1 Imperial Radch.md (204 bytes)
┃   ┗━━ 👀 ...
┗━━ 📂 words
    ┣━━ 📄 abode.md (598 bytes)
    ┣━━ 📄 abseil.md (452 bytes)
    ┣━━ 📄 abstruse.md (656 bytes)
    ┣━━ 📄 abut.md (335 bytes)
    ┣━━ 📄 actively.md (408 bytes)
    ┗━━ 👀 ...

Inspired by

Heavily inspired by obsidian-kindle-plugin, but without actual integration with Obsidian 😝

Assumptions

• for reading: highly depends on structure of the Kindle vocabulary database
• for deduplication: the files have to have readable front matter see this for technical details

Next steps

See issues