Fetches Kindle highlights from Readwise, selects the most relevant excerpts using Claude Sonnet 3.5, and turns them into Anki cards. Let me know if you find bugs or have ideas for improvement!
Important
This tool is only meant to help users process highlights books they own to create flashcards for private use. I recommend against sharing decks created with this tool, as doing so could potentially represent a copyright infringement.
- Python 3
- Use of Readwise, and the Readwise API token
- Anthropic API key
The code accesses Kindle highlights through Readwise, a service that collects notes and highlights from apps like Feedly, Pocket, or Kindle. You can get Readwise here.
- Clone this repository
- Install the required packages:
pip install -r requirements.txt
- Copy .env.example, rename it to
.env, and add your API keys:
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=your_anthropic_api_key
READWISE_TOKEN=your_readwise_token
You can generate an Anthropic API key here, and a Readwise API key here.
To fetch a book's highlights from Readwise, you need to know its Readwise ID. To list all books and their IDs present in your Readwise account, do:
./list_book_ids.py
Once you have the book ID, you can create an Anki deck.
./create_deck.py --book_id <book_id> --n-cards <n_cards> --deck_name <deck_name>
book_id: The ID of the book in Readwise (required)n-cards: The number of cards to generate (default: 20)deck_name: Name of the Anki deck to create (default: {book title} ({author}))
Anki decks are saved within the automatically generated ./decks directory. Each created card has a unique identifier, based on its location in the book. Hence, if you create another set of cards for the same book deck, no duplicate cards should end up in your Anki library.
The prompt used by Claude is in a separate file, called selection_prompt.txt. You can edit the prompt to give Claude different directions on which highlights is should prioritise. Note that editing the output format (e.g., adding variables to the JSON object) will likely break the code in utils.py.
show_metadata.py: Show Readwise metadata for a book. Simply use like so:
./show_metadata.py <book_id>