Claude Plugin Recovers Kindle Highlights Amazon's Export Limit Truncates

A personal Claude Code plugin marketplace, l3a0/claude-plugins, ships a skill called kindle-highlights that claws back highlights Amazon's export limit silently swallows. When you export a heavily-highlighted book from Amazon's notebook page, some highlights come back cut off mid-sentence and others as bare location numbers, under the notice: "Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits."

Those are your own notes, in your own account, capped by a budget Amazon doesn't document and you can't raise. The skill works around it by combining three sources: the notebook page DOM, the Mac Kindle app's synced annotation database (which stores exact character-precise positions with no export limit), and the Cloud Reader's rendered pages captured via canvas and OCR'd locally with Apple Vision.

Proven on four real books: 2,432 highlights extracted, 815 of them export-blocked (454 truncated + 361 fully hidden) — every one recovered, with recovered text landing within a couple of characters of the Kindle app's own position ruler (median residual 0–1).

How it works

The pipeline is macOS-only three times over: browser control runs over AppleScript, OCR uses Apple's Vision framework, and highlight positions come from the Mac Kindle app's data files. Prerequisites include Claude Desktop with the "Control Chrome" extension (Anthropic's browser-control MCP), Google Chrome signed into your Amazon account, the current Mac Kindle app (bundle id com.amazon.Lassen), Xcode Command Line Tools for compiling a Swift OCR helper, and python3 for building the final Markdown and running a localhost receiver.

The skill scrapes all highlights from the notebook page DOM to JSON, reads exact positions from the Kindle app's SQLite database, OCRs blocked text from Cloud Reader's rendered pages, and emits one Markdown file with ### Location N sections, blockquoted verbatim text, and flags for anything recovered or approximate, then runs a QA pass.

Scope and ethics

The skill exports your own highlights from your own Amazon account, by driving your own logged-in browser session and reading files the Kindle app stores on your Mac. The output is for personal notes — book text is copyrighted, so keep extracted notes private.

The build story — why the export limit exists, the three unlocks that beat it, and what a library of exports becomes — is written up in "How to Take Back Your Kindle Highlights."