kindle-pdf-capture

Capture Kindle for Mac pages via screen recording and build a high-quality PDF (with optional OCR).

📚 Languages: English · 日本語

Features

• Automatic content-region detection (strips window chrome, title bar, and Kindle header)
• Background capture via Quartz — no need to keep Kindle in the foreground
• Smart page-turn detection (frame-diff polling, no fixed sleep)
• LTR and RTL (manga) support via --direction
• Book-like PDF page sizing (300 DPI default)
• Optional OCR text layer via Tesseract (for non-macOS viewers; macOS Live Text works without it)
• End-of-book auto-detection (duplicate-frame streak)
• Manual cover-region selection via --manual-crop (drag-to-select UI for books with all-white covers)

Quick start

Requires macOS 15 or later, Python 3.11 or 3.12, and Kindle for Mac.

Upgrading from 1.4.x: version 2 requires macOS 15. An existing 1.4.x environment is not modified by this release and may continue to work, but it is outside the current support contract — and installing or rebuilding an environment below macOS 15 is not a supported path on either version. Update macOS before a clean install.

# Install
uv tool install kindle-pdf-capture

# Capture a book (open Kindle to the first page first)
kpc --out output/my-book

# Capture a right-to-left book (manga)
kpc --out output/my-manga --direction left

# Capture a book with an all-white cover (manual region selection)
kpc --out output/my-book --manual-crop

# See all options
kpc --help

With OCR

OCR needs Tesseract and Ghostscript as system dependencies, plus the [ocr] extra:

brew install tesseract tesseract-lang ghostscript
uv tool install "kindle-pdf-capture[ocr]"

kpc --out output/my-book --ocr

Working on the project itself? The installation guide covers installing from source.

Documentation

• Installation · インストール
• Usage · 使い方
• macOS permissions · macOS 権限
• Architecture · アーキテクチャ
• Troubleshooting · トラブルシューティング
• Legal · 法的事項

Support and feedback

• Q&A — installation, permissions, usage, OCR, and troubleshooting
• Ideas — proposals that still need discussion
• Issues — reproducible bugs and scoped work
• Security policy — private vulnerability reporting

English and Japanese posts are welcome.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.