Notebooks

A notebook for every book on your Kindle. For jailbroken Kindles, including older models like the Paperwhite 2.

Each book gets its own notebook. Your Kindle highlights and the notes you make on them in the reader appear there automatically, next to longer notes you write in Notebooks itself.

The app with public-domain sample books at the Paperwhite 2's app size (758×908). The keyboard is a real Paperwhite 2 screenshot.

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Features

• Reading now at the top: the book you last opened, with its cover and progress, one tap from its notebook
• A notebook per book, newest first, with three kinds of entry:
  • Your notes, written in Notebooks
  • Highlights you made in the Kindle reader
  • Kindle notes, shown with the highlight they belong to
• Read book jumps straight back into the book
• A full-height writing screen in a book font, with autosave
• Bullet lists, numbered lists and checklists (tick items off right in the notebook)
• Loose notes for anything not tied to a book
• Page numbers for highlights, from the Kindle or worked out from the book's page file (APNX)
• Picks up where you left off: reopening brings back the same notebook, page or note
• Notes are plain text files, one folder per book, so they're readable on your computer: notebooks/Walden/2026-10-18 201503.txt
• Never silently loses a note: "Saved" only appears once the text has been read back from disk

Highlights and Kindle notes are read from My Clippings.txt and are never changed. Edit or delete them in the book itself.

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Installation

You need a jailbroken Kindle with Scriptlet support (the Library runs .sh files from documents/).

1. Download notebooks-<version>.zip from Releases.
2. Unzip it and copy documents and extensions into the root of the Kindle. If those folders already exist, copy the contents into them.
3. Eject and open Notebooks from the Library.

The first launch registers Notebooks with the Kindle's app manager.

Updating

Copy the new extensions/notebooks over the old one. Your notes in /notebooks/ are never touched. The next tap of Notebooks closes the old version if it's still open.

Uninstalling

Delete documents/Notebooks.sh and extensions/notebooks/. Keep /notebooks/ if you want your notes.

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How it works

• The app is a web page run by the Kindle's built-in mesquite browser engine.
• A small native helper (notebooks_helper, C) does the file work. The page sends it requests over LIPC; it can only save or delete .txt files inside /mnt/us/notebooks/, refresh the data, and open a book from documents/. It never runs a shell with anything the page sends.
• After every change the helper rewrites /tmp/notebooks/data.js (library from the Kindle's database, My Clippings.txt, all notes, and an acknowledgement for the request). The page reloads it and compares the saved text with what you typed.
• Nothing stays running in the background. Once you leave Notebooks (Home, another app, Read book) the helper closes the app's window and exits: on a 256 MB Paperwhite 2 a browser window left loaded can starve other apps of memory. Your place (notebook, page, open note) is kept in /tmp/notebooks/state.js, so reopening lands where you left off.
• The helper runs from a copy in /tmp, so plugging in over USB can't leave it holding files open.

Building

The helper is cross-compiled by GitHub Actions with koxtoolchain and kindle-sdk for kindlepw2 (soft-float, older firmware) and kindlehf.

Tests run on any machine:

./tests/run_core_tests.sh      # helper: paths, base64, JSON, atomic writes, URL encoding
node tests/test_lib.js         # app logic: clippings, library, notebooks, lists

Tested on

Kindle Paperwhite 2 (6th gen), firmware 5.12.2.2. Other models and firmware are untested.

Credits

• Inspired by KNotes by kurizu; Notebooks is a separate app written from scratch.
• LIPC header from openlipc (MIT).
• The Kindle modding community's write-ups on Illusion-style mesquite apps.

License

MIT