kn — Kindle Notes CLI

Extract, sync, and search your Kindle highlights from the command line.

Reads highlights from the Mac Kindle app (com.amazon.Lassen) using two methods:

• Local KFX parsing for DRM-free sideloaded books (PDOCs)
• Playwright browser scraping for DRM-protected store purchases (EBOKs)

All highlights are stored in a local SQLite database with full-text search.

Installation

Requires Python 3.12+ and the Mac Kindle app.

uv tool install git+https://github.com/delebedev/kindle-notes.git

Then install Playwright's Chromium (needed for store-bought books):

playwright install chromium

This downloads a Chromium binary (~150 MB). Without this step, kn sync will still work for DRM-free/sideloaded books but will fail when scraping store purchases.

Alternative: run without installing

uv run --from git+https://github.com/delebedev/kindle-notes.git kn sync

Quick start

# Sync all highlights from your Kindle app
kn sync

# List your books
kn list

# Search across all highlights
kn search "compound interest"

Commands

kn sync

Syncs highlights from the Kindle app into ~/.config/kn/highlights.db.

• Parses local KFX files for DRM-free books (fast, no network)
• Scrapes Amazon notebook via Playwright for DRM books (slower, needs cookies)
• Deduplicates automatically — safe to re-run

kn sync              # sync all books
kn sync --book ASIN  # sync a single book

kn list

Lists all synced books with highlight counts.

$ kn list
  Atomic Habits: The life-changing million-copy #1 bestseller
    B01N5AX61W | EBOK | 121 highlights
  AI Engineering: Building Applications with Foundation Models
    B0DPLNK9GN | EBOK | 219 highlights

kn show <book>

Shows all highlights for a book. Accepts a fuzzy title match or exact ASIN.

kn show "atomic"     # fuzzy match
kn show B01N5AX61W   # exact ASIN

kn search <query>

Full-text search across all highlights using SQLite FTS5.

$ kn search "marginal gains"
1 results:

  "the aggregation of marginal gains," which was the philosophy of
  searching for a tiny margin of improvement in everything you do.
  -- Atomic Habits [yellow]

kn export

Export highlights to stdout as markdown or JSON.

kn export                    # all books, markdown
kn export --json-out         # all books, JSON
kn export --book "atomic"    # single book

How it works

1. Local annotations — reads ksdk_annotation_v1.db from the Kindle app container for highlight positions
2. KFX extraction — for DRM-free books, parses .azw8 files via kfxlib to extract the actual highlighted text
3. Notebook scraping — for DRM books, uses Playwright to open read.amazon.com/notebook, click each book, and scroll to load all highlights
4. Cookie auth — reads Cookies.binarycookies from the Kindle app for Amazon authentication (no login needed)

Configuration

Optional config file at ~/.config/kn/config.toml:

# Amazon domain — change for your region (default: amazon.com)
# Options: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.co.jp, etc.
amazon_domain = "amazon.com"

Can also be set via environment variable: KN_AMAZON_DOMAIN=amazon.co.uk kn sync

Data

• Config & database: ~/.config/kn/
• Kindle app data: ~/Library/Containers/com.amazon.Lassen/Data/

License

GPL v3 — kfxlib is vendored from calibre-kfx-input under GPL v3.