hoishing/playbook2md

Convert Google Playbook Annotations into Markdown Files

Google Playbook Annotations to Markdown

• 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
• 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