KindleWise

The Frustration That Started This

I read a lot. And I highlight even more. After finishing a book, I'd export my highlights from the Kindle app expecting to have a nice reference for later. What I got instead was a mess.

Book titles came out mangled — "Think Again_ The Power of Knowing What Yo - Adam Grant" instead of the actual title. My pink highlights (the ones I specifically marked as important) just... disappeared into the regular pile. Notes I'd written got separated from the highlights they belonged to. And trying to import any of this into Readwise? Even messier.

I'd spent hours cleaning up exports by hand. Find-and-replace for broken titles. Manually tagging favorites. Reattaching notes to highlights. At some point I realized I was spending more time organizing my reading than actually reading.

So I built KindleWise. Drop your Kindle HTML export in your browser, and it handles all of this automatically. No accounts, no uploading to some server — everything runs locally.

What You Can Do

See Your Reading Patterns

The first time I saw charts of my own highlights, I learned something uncomfortable: some books I thought I loved had almost no highlights. I'd been reading passively for years without realizing it. The visual analytics show you how many highlights per book, when you were most active, which genres you actually engage with. It's like a mirror for your reading habits.

Talk to Your Highlights

This is the feature I use most. When I'm writing something and need that quote about curiosity I remember highlighting six months ago, I don't scroll through hundreds of highlights anymore. I just ask: "What did this book say about staying curious?" The AI pulls from your actual highlights — not some generic summary from the internet.

It works because these are your highlights. The things you found interesting. The passages you thought were worth remembering. Having a conversation with that collection is surprisingly useful.

(You'll need a Gemini API key for this. Your data goes to Google's API using your key — I never see your highlights.)

Export to Readwise

This was my original itch. Readwise is great for surfacing old highlights, but the Kindle import was always broken for me. Chapter headings appeared as regular highlights instead of section breaks. Pink highlights lost their favorite status. Notes floated around without context.

KindleWise exports a clean CSV where chapter titles become proper .h1 tags, pink highlights become .favorite, and notes stay attached to their highlights. Upload to Readwise and it just works.

Cleaned Up Metadata

The tool fetches proper book info from Google Books, so even if your Kindle export has butchered the title and author, the export will have the correct metadata. Small thing, but it matters when you're building a library.

How to Get Your Kindle Export

1. Open the Kindle app on your Mac or PC
2. Go to the book you want to export
3. Click the Notebook icon (top right — looks like a little notepad)
4. Click Export and choose HTML
5. Drop that file into KindleWise

Your Data Stays Yours

The app runs entirely in your browser. Your highlights never touch my servers. The only exception is if you use the AI chat feature — that sends highlights to Google's Gemini API with your own key. Even then, I have no access to any of it.

Questions

"It says invalid Kindle HTML format"

Make sure you're exporting from the desktop Kindle app (not the cloud reader) and choosing HTML format. Some older Kindle versions have quirks — if you're stuck, the CLI version on GitHub might handle your format better.

"Do I need Readwise?"

Nope. The analytics and AI chat work independently. Readwise export is just one of the options.

"Why free?"

I built it for myself. Figured others had the same frustration.