pocketbook-notes

Tool to extract and insert notes & highlights from a Pocketbook (also known as Vivlio in France) e-reader to another

TL;DR Usage:

1. reboot your legacy e-reader
2. copy legacy reader's /mnt/ext1/system/config/books.db into a run directory to be created next to source
3. run python source/main.py (some other options can be interesting, see python source/main.py -h)
4. reboot your target e-reader
5. copy target reader's /mnt/ext1/system/config/books.db into run directory
6. run python source/main.py -a import -s -- dry-run|grep WARNING (some other options can be interesting, see python source/main.py -h)
7. on target e-reader, open all missing books if you want its notes to be imported
8. run again 4. to 7. until you are OK. You may also alter run/notes.json file if author and/or titles are different for same book between legacy and target e-reader, or to delete some useless notes...
9. copy run/books.db into target reader's /mnt/ext1/system/config/books.db
10. reboot your target e-reader
11. pray and/or enjoy

Extract

Take a books.db file (typically found on /mnt/ext1/system/config/; this can also be /system/profiles/default/, especially for recent devices, I was said), and extract all notes and highlights into a notes.json file (deduplicated as far as we can)

caveats : When getting books.db, just make sure (for instance by rebooting the reader before) that all the wal are actually synced into books.db, so no more books.db-wal or books.db-shm in /mnt/ext1/system/config/

Import

Given a books.db file and a notes.json file, add these into books.db. You will have to put back books.db file on reader's /mnt/ext1/system/config/

Caveats : notes from notes.json from a book never opened on books.db's reader (same Title/Author) won't be inserted

Definitely, it's not easy from a printed book to identify page & offset in order to uild a notes.json file, but in my case I wanted to re-insert notes from a previous reader's books.db database, so it's OK.

technical notes

Caveats :

• Not quite sure how we should build UUID, when from scratch... might be dependent from other fields ? => by default, let us keep the same as in the original db
• I had it work on my PB632 (french vivlio version, with pocketbook ROM 6.7.1706 and rooted) YMMV, SGDG, toussa

devcontainer :

• https://code.visualstudio.com/learn/develop-cloud/containers
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/python/python-tutorial
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/containers/quickstart-python
• https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-try-python ?