Indexing Kindle books

I own a number of Kindle books that I use for my research project, and I would dearly love to be able to search their full contents using Devonthink – not by having the text itself live in Devonthink, necessarily, but just by indexing those Kindle books. From what I can tell from reading posts here, that seems not to be possible … but before I give up I thought I’d ask explicitly.

It is not. You can prove it to yourself. Your Kindle books are here:


~/Library/Containers/com.amazon.Kindle/Data/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content/

You’ll notice there is no way to preview the book or search its content outside of the Kindle app.

… but if you’re in a hacking mood, you could use a process patterned on this to de-DRM your books and convert them to PDF.

I happened to use Calibre (described in the prior link) on one Kindle book. It does work. I had to play around with the settings to get to get reasonable page size and font size. (Can easily turn a 300 page e-book in to 1000+ pages with large fonts, etc.) Not sure if once one finds settings that work, you can just run with that on several books. Fortunately, I only needed to do one.

What I found is that the converted file didn’t look polished and not possible to get the page numbers to correlate with the Kindle locations (though those change around too).

Thanks, all – I may just try Calibre, then index the books in DT.

Blake