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hadynz / obsidian-kindle-plugin

Sync your Kindle notes and highlights directly into your Obsidian vault
MIT License
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Automatic Tags or Pages from Amazon or ISBN Data #179

Open KnowTheFuture opened 2 years ago

KnowTheFuture commented 2 years ago

First posted here: https://forum.obsidian.md/t/kindle-highlights-plugin-adding-tags-from-isbn-or-amazon-categories/41160

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. I'd like to see all of my Kindle books, not just the ones with highlights and then be able to group them into categories and subcategories AND use existing category information, either from Amazon (Category, Sub-Category) and/or the ISBN entry - either as a tag and/or a page connection.

Describe the solution you'd like A clear and concise description of what you want to happen.

Clicking on the Amazon reference link displays the category and sub-category at the top of the page.

I'd like to streamline this process, so it is done automatically.

Describe alternatives you've considered 0 - For all books, I am adding a highlight to every book in my collection

For Tags and Categorization

  1. Fully Automated: API calls to ISBN - outside my technical expertise
  2. Semi-Automated: Web scraper
    1. Played around with a web scraper to see if it could pull the Category and Sub-Category data from the book page, and save in Google Sheets.
    2. These entries would then be modified using formulas, A2=Business, B2=Economics, C2="["&A2$"]", D2="["&B2$"]", then the results would be pasted into each entry.
  3. Manual: Doing 100% manually - not sustainable

Additional context Screenshot Added

Screen Shot 2022-07-31 at 11 12 29
hadynz commented 2 years ago

I'd like to see all of my Kindle books, not just the ones with highlights

This plugin currently has two sources to pull data from:

  1. Amazon's online Kindle reader (e.g. https://read.amazon.com/notebook)
  2. My Clippings.txt file on your Kindle

These two sources will only display books that have highlights. Meaning, that a book that you've purchased or loaded will not be surfaced in these sources until you make one highlight.

One solution to work around this is to add a new optional connection to your Goodreads account if you have one. If you've this service before, you know that it will list all the books that you've marked as read (any other categories such as want to read).

hadynz commented 2 years ago

I can ask some more questions to better understand your idea:

  1. Why do you want to have books that you've read but haven't highlighted any clippings in your Obsidian vault? I am curious to learn about what use case you have for knowing such titles.

  2. If you've purchased a book from Amazon (e.g. Outliers, The Stand), can you be more specific about which meta data on the Amazon pages you wanted the plugin to import? Some screenshots would be great.

  3. Can you walk me through one manual example of how you pulled all the data for one of your books. It would help me understand if any of the steps that you've taken can be automated.

  4. It is possible that some aspects of your request falls out of the scope of this plugin (e.g. building the table of contents of your books). Would you consider using another plugin such as Dataview with Kindle Highlights?

KnowTheFuture commented 2 years ago

I can ask some more questions to better understand your idea:

  1. Why do you want to have books that you've read but haven't highlighted any clippings in your Obsidian vault? I am curious to learn about what use case you have for knowing such titles. Obsidian is about seeing and making connections.

Let's say I have 10 books about a topic (ex. cooking, science, history), but I've only read and highlighted 2 - what about the other 8? They are in my library, but if I am not aware of them, or able to see their overlap or differences. For example, if I have 10 books on history; 5 might be books on European History, 5 might be on Middle Eastern history, but if I have only noted 1 on European history and 1 on Middle Eastern history, I'd like to be aware that I have other books that cover the topic.

  1. If you've purchased a book from Amazon (e.g. Outliers, The Stand), can you be more specific about which meta data on the Amazon pages you wanted the plugin to import? Some screenshots would be great.

Ideally, I'd like to see the book categories imported as tags or pages automatically - these are several usable examples 34614082-697F-4ED6-AFC4-34D7DAEB379D_1_201_a 99231576-D20F-4DF8-B936-25699DF61E72_1_201_a

This example is a bit simple - there is only one category: Marketing E7E696D3-A666-4EE6-A7C9-E844C3D58ADB_1_201_a

Unfortunately, this does not tell me anything about the book: Fiction, Fantasy, Virus, Plague, Pandemic 30362E08-7CDB-440C-8CA4-064CA76F558C_1_201_a

  1. Can you walk me through one manual example of how you pulled all the data for one of your books. It would help me understand if any of the steps that you've taken can be automated.
  1. Does the book have a comment or highlighted passage?
  2. If yes, then it is already in Kindle highlights.
  3. If no, than a comment or highlight needs to be added.
  4. Open book on Kindle, highlight a word, page, or section and highlight.
  5. Close and move on to next book.
  6. Adding a comment or highlight makes it visible, otherwise the remainder are ignored.
  7. Once a book is added to the Obsidian library, it can be moved into folders (fiction, non-fiction), subfolders (topics) and tagged.
  1. It is possible that some aspects of your request falls out of the scope of this plugin (e.g. building the table of contents of your books). Would you consider using another plugin such as Dataview with Kindle Highlights?

Yes, I am still early in my Obsidian journey.