Readwise

Readwise Skill

Interact with the Readwise API to manage your reading highlights, books, articles, and daily review queue.

Setup

1. Get your access token at: https://readwise.io/access_token
2. Set the environment variable:

export READWISE_ACCESS_TOKEN="your_token_here"

Or store it:

echo "your_token_here" > ~/.config/readwise/token
export READWISE_ACCESS_TOKEN=$(cat ~/.config/readwise/token)

API Basics

All requests use:

TOKEN="$READWISE_ACCESS_TOKEN"
BASE="https://readwise.io/api/v2"

curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" "$BASE/..."

Common Operations

List Recent Highlights

# Latest 20 highlights
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  "$BASE/highlights/?page_size=20" | \
  python3 -c "import json,sys; [print(f'{h[\"id\"]}: {h[\"text\"][:80]}') for h in json.load(sys.stdin)['results']]"

Search Highlights by Keyword

# Search highlights containing a word
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  "$BASE/highlights/?search=focus&page_size=10" | \
  python3 -c "import json,sys; [print(f'{h[\"text\"][:100]}') for h in json.load(sys.stdin)['results']]"

Get Today's Daily Review

# Fetch today's review queue
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  "$BASE/review/" | \
  python3 -c "import json,sys; [print(f'📖 {h[\"highlight\"][\"text\"][:120]}') for h in json.load(sys.stdin)['highlights']]"

List Books / Sources

# All books/sources in your library
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  "$BASE/books/?page_size=20" | \
  python3 -c "import json,sys; [print(f'{b[\"id\"]} | {b[\"title\"]} by {b[\"author\"]}') for b in json.load(sys.stdin)['results']]"

Add a New Highlight

curl -s -X POST -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "$BASE/highlights/" \
  -d '{
    "highlights": [{
      "text": "The highlight text you want to save",
      "title": "Book or Article Title",
      "author": "Author Name",
      "source_type": "api"
    }]
  }'

Update a Highlight (Add Note or Tag)

# Add a note to highlight ID 12345
curl -s -X PATCH -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  "$BASE/highlights/12345/" \
  -d '{"note": "This reminds me of Feynman'"'"'s approach to learning."}'

Export All Highlights (EPUB/JSON)

# Export full highlights library as JSON
curl -s -H "Authorization: Token $TOKEN" \
  "$BASE/export/" | python3 -m json.tool > ~/readwise_export.json
echo "Exported to ~/readwise_export.json"

Highlight Object Fields

Notes

• Rate limit: 20 requests/minute for most endpoints
• The /review/ endpoint gives the daily spaced-repetition queue
• page_size max is 1000 for most list endpoints
• Use cursor pagination for large libraries: ?page_size=1000&cursor=<next_cursor>
• Readwise syncs from Kindle, Instapaper, Pocket, Twitter, and more automatically