Giving e-reader quotes a better future 🌳

Hi! I've been reading digitally for a few years now, and in the case of non-fiction, I take a lot of notes. And, as you might have also experienced, these notes are prone to get lost, buried, and forgotten.

I'm also very fond of the idea of Zettelkasten — a sort of permanent note/idea storage where everything goes, ideally promoting growth of singular ideas and thoughts into bigger stuff. Like a sort of garden? 🌻

And so, this is a very personal solution for (maybe) a general problem. This script helps me take the highlights from my device, transform them by accessing the original surrounding context, and then creating tiddlers out of them (for TiddlyWiki, a platform akin to Obsidian, in the spirit of Zettelkasten).

Hmm. For this to be of any use for you, you'd need to read on a Kobo device, be a little comfortable with computers, and use TiddlyWiki. Considering the various different pieces that constitute this program,

— there is a scraper utility that connects to the Kobo device database;

— and then there's a parser, that finds a given highlight in the surrounding context (the .epub file);

— finally, all of it is assembled in a Textual interface.

I very much doubt it can be useful out of the box, but maybe there's something that might help if you find yourself looking for similar stuff?

Also, there's on my personal website with more details on how all of this works.

Because of copyright (and privacy) issues, I'm not providing any of the books I've used as examples. But Jane Eyre is already on public domain, and so I included a sample of my own database, with a copy of the corresponding .epub file. As luck would have it, it is the only book that renders incorrectly; I'm sorry for that, but won't be making any changes on the code in the near future.

Not really, no; because, as you might have experienced, programming doesn't really have an endgame, and there are a few bugs to tackle and improvements to make. But I also want to focus on other things, and I am generally bad at closure in my life, and making this public brings it to a sort of big checkpoint that allows me breathing space to tackle on other stuff.

Yes! Thank you for the kind words. I had a lot of fun, experimented with some cool frameworks and, maybe most important, made my life a little easier in a task that is very meaningful to me.

Well, it's been a while since I made code public, and so I understand that confusion. But I think this is a really good format, becauat the end of the README — when there is very little information to further provide — this derails into something like self-therapy, and I get to reply to someone asking questions but that is really just me having a dialogue with someone, like, an imaginary friend 🧸