Skip to content

Google Playbook Annotations to Markdown

binder py-badge mit black-badge

  • convert ebook annotations(highlights and custom notes) of Google Playbook to markdown files
  • one markdown file per book

🔗 source code

Motivation

I am a heavy Google Playbooks user. Why?

  • compare to Amazon, it has much more Chinese titles
  • compare to Taiwan ebook stores, it has much more English titles 😂

In short, it has the largest ebook collection for my reading languages. If I want to use just one provider to centralize my ebooks and annotations, store them online so that I can access them anytime in multiple devices(phone, tablet, laptop...) Playbook is a good choice. Not to mention the price in Playbook often a little lower then others.

After using Zettelkasten with Obsidian as my personal knowledge management system, I think its good to integrate the learning/insights from my previous reading into Obsidian. So I want to extract the annotations from Playbook. Playbook does store them on google docs though, in a format not easy to re-use 🤷‍♀️... So I decided to extract them directly from Google Takeout.

Usage

Download Your Ebook Annotations

  • export ebook annotations for Google Playbook through Google Takeout
  • select json format
  • download the exported annotations as a zip file

Prepare Your Runtime Environment

  • run online with binder
  • or locally with python >= 3.10 + ipykernel in VSCode

Extract Annotations to Markdown

  • set the following in the "params" section of playbook.ipynb:

    • vault: folder path of exported markdown files
    • takeout_zip: path of the zip file downloaded from Google Takeout

  • run all cells of playbook.ipynb

  • markdown files should be generated inside the vault folder

Questions?

Open a github issue or ping me on Twitter twitter-icon