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Kindle, ebooks 101, notes and Pandoc

Kindle, ebooks 101, notes and Pandoc

September 17, 2025

TL;DR

A recap on the last ~5y+ of kindles notes.

Pandoc can do very cool things.

+++ Business Model Canvas

Intro

Being able to create a ebook as a code and having a website to publish it is great.

But if you have consumed ebooks that other has written, you will have a lot of clippins.

Those notes saved for years.

Just waiting for you to get and read them.

So this is mostly a create + understand notes from kindle.

Rather than a way to admire how people have created static status pages: https://open-slum.pages.dev/ nor get things.

Uptime monitor / status pages in cloudflare pages

Uptime Kuma | Docker Config 🐋 ↗ Kener | Docker Config 🐋 ↗

Kener Status Pages

alt text

With this, you will be able to create and distribute via epublibre or amazon https://www.amazon.es/sendtokindle.

Kindle Notes to AI

Kindle notes are saved into a .txt in the device.

I was storing notes for few years already and im really curious to see whats inside.

Some time back I saw:

But in the meantime, there were news:

I gave it a try with Google’s NotebookLLM, now even Perplexity can help you upload that txt and clear them…

Custom is custom, but…would it be better out of the box?

Perplexity custom files as source

ℹī¸
Kindles files wont be recognized unless you use a proper microUSB data cable. You can access their content via https://read.amazon.com/landing

Parsing the notes via Python

As simple as this:

python extract_notes.py "Brainfluence" brainfluence_notes.txt
Clippings to smaller txt | Py Script ↗

Conclusions

Recently I wrote about note taking tools and how to build your KB/Knowledge Base.

As I cant stop being impressed by all we can achieve with simple markdown…

  1. With Pandoc you can create pdf from your .md as seen on this Jira post.
python3 test-pandoc.py

# Replace emojis with text equivalents
sed 's/✅/[OK]/g; s/❌/[X]/g; s/īŋŊīŋŊ/[CHART]/g' jira-pdm-req2tech.md > input-clean.md
pandoc input-clean.md -o jira-estimation.pdf --pdf-engine=xelatex --toc

And pushing to epub kindle compatible is also fine.

You can also try with these tools

  1. Katex is also great

  2. Recently, I got to know about Typst here

KaTeX and Typst serve entirely different purposes, so the comparison isn’t about which is “better,” but which is appropriate for a given task.

  • KaTeX is a JavaScript library for rendering mathematical notation in web browsers.
  • Typst is a complete, modern document typesetting system and programming language designed to replace LaTeX.
FeatureKaTeXTypst
Primary GoalFast, high-quality math rendering for the web (HTML/JavaScript).Complete, modern document typesetting (compiles to PDF).
ScopeMath-only.Full documents (text, math, figures, tables, bibliography, etc.).
OutputHTML/CSS.PDF.
Input SyntaxLaTeX math syntax (\frac{1}{2}, \sum_{n=1}^{\infty}).Custom, simplified markup language for text, with its own math mode syntax (sum_(n=1)^oo 1/n).
SpeedExtremely fast rendering on a web page.Extremely fast compilation to PDF (often much faster than LaTeX).
Customization/ExtensibilityLimited (focus on speed and core math support).High (uses a built-in scripting/programming language for layouts and templates).

KaTeX is optimized for speed and fidelity on the web. It’s meant to take an existing math expression (using LaTeX syntax) and display it beautifully in a web page without relying on a server.

  • Pros: Blazing fast, produces high-quality, non-janky math, and has a very small footprint.
  • Cons: Math only. It cannot render full documents, handle complex layouts, or process general LaTeX commands (only the math subset).

Typst is a holistic tool aiming to modernize document creation. It’s designed to be more intuitive and robust than LaTeX, using a clean markup that integrates better with a powerful scripting language.

  • Pros: Excellent developer experience (simple syntax, good error messages, near-instant compilation/live preview), superior programming capabilities for complex layout and template creation, and native PDF output.

  • Cons: Young ecosystem (fewer specialized packages and journal templates compared to LaTeX), and a new math syntax that requires learning even for existing LaTeX users. Typst’s math rendering is a component of the whole system, not a specialized web library like KaTeX.

  • Use KaTeX when you have a website or application and need to display math formulas quickly to the user.

  • Use Typst when you need to write a document (a paper, thesis, report, book) and generate a final PDF file.

FAQ

JailBreak a Kindle

But, I got to know that this is possible: https://kindlemodding.org/

See also https://github.com/NiLuJe/KindleTool

Tools for eBooks

Converting to epub

A simple Docker-based REST API that converts Markdown to EPUB format using Pandoc. Send markdown content via JSON, get an EPUB file back.

Business Canvas

What is AffinePro

If you are building a KB, you might consider AFFine:

The universal editor that lets you work, play, present or create just about anything.

#chmod +x affine-0.13.5-stable-linux-x64.appimage
#./affine-0.13.5-stable-linux-x64.appimage
Flask x Stripe Payment Links...My Fav Web browsers & their automation