In 2010, I purchased my first Kindle and since then apart from GEB [1], I haven’t bothered with physical copies. The Kindle store satisfies most of my needs (I find situations where the paperback costs less than the digital copy and refuse to buy the book on principle).
The books can be read on any platform (OS X, iOS for iPad and iPhone in my case and I do remember a rather unpleasant Kindle app on WP7)
One of the benefits of a digital book is that it should be straightforward for me to collect a list of highlights I’ve made about the book. Amazon (in their infinite wisdom) have not provided an API in the 3 or so years I’ve used the Kindle ecosystem and manually transcribing the quotes is not something I am interested in doing. Scraping remains the only alternative. I decided to use clojure for this task.
For ClueWeb, I discarded the use of Selenium since running a browser impedes the crawler. Selenium is a good fit for this problem which can be summarized as:
(logging into kindle.amazon.com -> downloading a list o of book-specific-s-expressions -> download highlights for desired book/author)
The following routines accomplish that. I dump both to file since my list of books read does not grow by the second so it is feasible to work with a stale file.
The resulting s-expressions look like this:
Book-Details:
| (("C# 4.0 in a Nutshell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/4-0-nutshell-in-oreilly-ebook/B0031LMNOQ/B0043D2DN2" | |
| "Joseph Albahari, Ben Albahari") | |
| ("Cat's Cradle (Kurt Vonnegut Series)" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/cats-cradle-vonnegut-series-ebook/B000AGP4I2/B003XRELGQ" | |
| "Kurt Vonnegut") | |
| ("The Communist Manifesto" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/the-communist-manifesto-ebook/B000AI8C7K/B000JQUHLC" | |
| "Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels") | |
| ("The Complete Sherlock Holmes: with an introduction from Robert Ryan" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/the-complete-sherlock-holmes-ebook/B00CHRXN0S/B00AHE20W0" | |
| "Arthur Conan Doyle") | |
| ("CUDA by Example: An Introduction to General-Purpose GPU Programming" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/cuda-example-introduction-general-purpose-ebook/B003DXRWEI/B003VYBOSE" | |
| "Jason Sanders, Edward Kandrot") | |
| ("Cursed Immortals 1: Judas and the Vampires (Two Novels)" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/cursed-immortals-vampires-novels-ebook/B0051K7XO0/B00513E0FM" | |
| "Aiden James") | |
| ("A Damsel in Distress" | |
| "https://kindle.amazon.com/work/a-damsel-in-distress-ebook/B000B10JVI/B000JQU7CG" | |
| "P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse") | |
| . | |
| . | |
| .) |
And the highlights:
| ("All this responsibility at such an early age made her a bitchy flibbertigibbet." | |
| "This was a fairly pretty girl, except that she had legs like an Edwardian grand piano." | |
| "A chaplain’s assistant is customarily a figure of fun in the American Army. Billy was no exception. He was powerless to harm the enemy or to help his friends." | |
| "He didn’t look like a soldier at all. He looked like a filthy flamingo." | |
| "“Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker.” The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody—and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road." | |
| "The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God Almighty." | |
| "A blood gutter, Billy learned, was the shallow groove in the side of the blade of a sword or bayonet." | |
| "One of the inventions was sticking a dentist’s drill into a guy’s" | |
| "“You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert—see? He’s facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies.”" | |
| "“Know why the blade’s triangular?” “No.” “Makes a wound that won’t close up.” “Oh.” “Makes a three-sided hole in a guy. You stick an ordinary knife in a guy—makes a slit. Right? A slit closes right up. | |
| Right?”" | |
| "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops." | |
| . | |
| . | |
| . | |
| . | |
| "Now what was the grand result of all these struggles? Europe expended millions of her treasures, and the blood of two million of her people; and a handful of quarrelsome knights retained possession of Palestine for about one hundred years!") |
Both there are (slightly-curated) s-expressions from my reading lists and Kurt Vonnegut books respectively. You can work on curating the resulting s-expressions using your own techniques.
I have a command line wrapper around it. Details on the github repo wiki [2]. What would be more interesting is to make the filter a routine a bit better than a linear scan + regular expression match.
[1] Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
[2] https://github.com/shriphani/clojure-kindle-highlights/ go-back