I've done something similar myself with Kindle Cloud Reader a few months ago. For the purpose of language learning, I wanted to extract the surrounding context of every word I highlighted in books I read. Turns out it's impossible only with the device.
On Kindle Cloud Reader, Amazon serves images for the pages of the book, so you can't directly read the text. But you can indeed OCR the images and extract the context like that. I created a small browser extension with Claude.
It's crazy how difficult Amazon made this process for reasonable use cases like that.
One thing that has led to me creating way more highlights is KOReader+BookOrbit. Now that I know my highlights aren't locked up in Amazon/Kindle's ecosystem I'm more likely to highlight something.
I had a lot of fun hooking up some e-ink displays in my house to call out to BookOrbit to get the highlights and display them. Highlighting something in my book and then seeing it on a screen a day or two later is more fun than I would have guessed.
Remotely related. I made this KOreader plugin around yesterday using Claude code to take notes (actually just scribbles) on my old Kindle Paperwhite 4 (2018, 10th gen) https://github.com/SMUsamaShah/fingerink.koplugin
I didn't know this was possible at all. I saw some plugins to take notes using Stylus and thought capacitative touch should work too.
Cool plugin. I got annoyed myself when Kindle cut off long highlights. The fact that the author managed to pull them out using the Mac's local database and OCR is solid. And good on them for not using third-party services for recognition, but going with Apple Vision instead — fast and no extra hassle. Shame it's tied to macOS, but for Mac owners it's perfect. Anyway, useful thing for those who actually read a lot and take notes.
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On Kindle Cloud Reader, Amazon serves images for the pages of the book, so you can't directly read the text. But you can indeed OCR the images and extract the context like that. I created a small browser extension with Claude.
It's crazy how difficult Amazon made this process for reasonable use cases like that.
It's not perfect, but it's usually enough context to produce a decent translation.
I had a lot of fun hooking up some e-ink displays in my house to call out to BookOrbit to get the highlights and display them. Highlighting something in my book and then seeing it on a screen a day or two later is more fun than I would have guessed.
I didn't know this was possible at all. I saw some plugins to take notes using Stylus and thought capacitative touch should work too.