Google Books Highlights Export

Export your highlights from Google Books into a convenient format.

Google Books is able to sync your highlights to a folder in your Google Drive account, typically called "Play Books Notes", but extracting these highlights to a more useful form does not appear to be supported.

Given the folder ID of your "Play Books Notes" folder in Google Drive, this tool can save your highlights, including links back to the original sections in your books.

It outputs a single JSON file by default, or Markdown with --format markdown (one .md file per book plus an index.md).

Setup

Getting your folder ID

You will need to find the folder ID for your Play Books notes. To do this, navigate to your Play Books notes folder in Google Drive, and take the folder ID from the URL. The URL should look like https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/xxxxxxxxx; the folder ID is xxxxxxxxx.

Installing the tool

uv tool install google-books-highlights-export

Or, to run from a checkout of this repo:

cd cli
uv run google-books-highlights-export <FOLDER ID>

Running

You are then ready to run

$ google-books-highlights-export [--format json|markdown] -o OUTPUT <FOLDER ID>

With the default --format json, the script writes all your highlights to a single JSON file at the path given by -o. For example (pretty-printed here; the file itself is written on one line):

[
  {
    "title": "Pride and Prejudice",
    "notes": [
      {
        "content": "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.",
        "link": "https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=AAAAAAAAAAAA&pg=GBS.PA1"
      },
      {
        "content": "I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.",
        "link": "https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=AAAAAAAAAAAA&pg=GBS.PA18"
      }
    ]
  },
  {
    "title": "Moby-Dick",
    "notes": [
      {
        "content": "Call me Ishmael.",
        "link": "https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=BBBBBBBBBBBB&pg=GBS.PA1"
      }
    ]
  }
]

With --format markdown, the script will output:

• One file per file in the specified Google Drive folder. Google Play Books creates one file per book you take notes in, so this means the script will generate one file per book. Each file will contain the text for all your highlights for that book, and each highlight will have an associated URL that will open the highlighted section of the book in the web reader.
• An index file, linking to all the generated files.

These go in the directory given by -o. For example, index.md:

# Books

- [Pride and Prejudice](<Pride and Prejudice.md>)
- [Moby-Dick](<Moby-Dick.md>)

and Pride and Prejudice.md:

# Pride and Prejudice

> It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

[Open in Google Books](https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=AAAAAAAAAAAA&pg=GBS.PA1)

> I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

[Open in Google Books](https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=AAAAAAAAAAAA&pg=GBS.PA18)

Google OAuth

The tool comes with its own Google OAuth client config, so there's nothing to set up. (For desktop apps, Google doesn't treat the OAuth client secret as confidential, which is why it can be shipped with the tool.)

You can use a different OAuth client with --client-config path/to/config.json. The tool only has the drive.file scope, so your client's Google Cloud project will need to have been granted access to your Play Books notes files.

When you run the tool for the first time, it will launch your web browser which will ask you to authenticate your project against your Google account to access the files from Google Drive.