How to access Kindle Highlights (API?)

Question

I want to make a site that lets you follow other people Kindle Highlights. Is this possible Is there some sort of Kindle Highlights API?

Thanks.

Answer 1

A user can see their highlights on the web after logging in by going to their "your highlights" page. As far as I know, there isn't an API, nor is there any sort of OAUTH thing that you could do so currently the best possible solution would be to get your user's amazon username/password and scrape them from that page.

It's better than nothing, but a real API would open up a lot of cool ideas that I've had on kindle highlights.

Answer 2

This would be an amazing web service. Amazon does not offer an API for this. You can read public highlights online at kindle.amazon.com, however, you cannot integrate any public highlights into your apps via an API yet. It seems that the new Kindle Developers Kit is purely for creating apps on the Kindle, and there is not even an API method for accessing public highlights in this kdk.

Answer 3

You can always just scrape the book's page at kindle.amazon.com. I wrote a script in js to do this and then packaged it up as a Chrome plugin that lights up when on Kindle book page, but (of course) Amazon just updated the DOM a week or two ago and now it needs to be updated to reflect the new semantic structure. This highlights the weakness of this approach. =\

Hopefully someday Amazon will provide us with an API, though I suspect that this might run against their agreements with publishers.

Answer 4

Shameless plug alert..

I've written a small PHP class that can help with this: Kindle_Highlights

You can get it on github.

Comments/suggestions welcome on improving it.

I will be improving/expanding this over the next few weeks, but as is you should be able to get at your kindle highlights.