Until recently it was difficult to review and consume the highlights in my Kindle books and then in June (2017) Amazon launched a new page under https://read.amazon.com/notebook.

Not bad, but what if I want to do something with the highlights? what if I want to compose something else based on it while being able to retain the context of where the highlight happened? What if I want a different way to internalize or share it in an structured way with my friends?

Today Amazon doesn’t offer an out of the box solution for those scenarios and as someone who enjoys not only learning and collecting new stuff but also writing about it, not having an easy way to do it was a dissatisfaction - also having to log into my Amazon account just to see the highlights was a major source of friction.

With a problem at hand and some free time I started to hack in a tool to help me do what I wanted, I decided to called it Kintrospect.

My main requirements were:

  • It should not require me to give someone else my Amazon credentials.
  • It should not require me to connect my Kindle.
  • It should not require me to run a third-party extension in my browser.
  • It should show me all my highlights and made them searchable.
  • It should work offline.
  • It should allow me to go easily into composition mode (no copy and paste into Evernote or other text editor).
  • It should allow me to download a markdown file which I can then put in my blog.

After some hacking I came up with a basic version which I’ve been using happily to write book directives.

I’ve started to publish some of my book directives under reading feed, I’ll be updating it with more books that I have read or that I’ll be reading.

For people interested in trying Kintrospect the website is https://kintrospect.com/.

I look forward to hearing from others and see how they are using their Kindle highlights - Derek Sivers book page was a source of inpirationg and helped me understand what I was looking for.

If you end up using the tool, plese let me know - I’d love to publish your book notes in the Kintrospect page.

Happy reading!