Updated December, 2021
This is a very quick-and-dirty method to pull all the books that Amazon knows you have bought or borrowed for your Kindle. There are various ways to export the list of purchased books from Amazon but I read a lot of e-books from the library and couldn’t find a way to export those. (Dec, 2021 Update: Fixed code after Amazon revamped their layout – thanks for letting me know, Robin!)
(click here to hide directions)
Directions:
This is not a very simple process. At a high level we need to log into Amazon, find the page that lists all the books, and then copy the HTML code that makes up that page. Finally paste that code into the text box below and it will create a table listing the titles, authors and the date purchased or borrowed (kind of, Amazon eliminated the borrowed date in 2021 so we only have expiration date now).
- Log into amazon.com and click “Accounts & Lists” and then “Content & Devices”. You may need to click through your device, until you get to “Manage your Content and Devices” and the “Content” tab.
- You need to view the source code behind this webpage but, because Amazon dynamically loads the list of books, you can’t just use View Source. Instead you need to get to the Developer Tools, which is <F12> on most browsers. Once you do this, you should see a new frame come up on the bottom of your screen.
- In the new frame (which is the developer tools, screenshots using FireFox web browser but others are similar), there should be an icon with a box and an arrow pointing to that box, typically on the top-left of the new frame. Hovering your mouse over this will say something like, “Select Element”. Click this button, and move your cursor up to the main window. When you put your mouse over something, it will highlight. Move your mouse basically to the middle of the screen (so you’re over a book title) and then move it up until the entire table of books is highlighted (mouse between the white books section and under the “Showing X to Y of Z items” text. Click (left-click) to set the focus.
- In the bottom frame, right-click on the highlighted line and select “Copy” > “Inner HTML”.
- Come back to this (the parser) screen, click in the text area below and Paste. You should get a big bunch of code pasted in the box.
- Click the “Parse” button and, if all goes well, a table below will appear with your information! Unfortunately, as of 2021 you have to repeat this for every page since Amazon now limits you to 25 items/page.
- You can easily copy and paste the table into Excel or other spreadsheets if you prefer to save the data locally that way.
Paste the code from Amazon’s “Manage Your Content and Devices” page here:
(paste data and click “Parse”)
| Title | Author | Date Purchased / Expired |
|---|---|---|
| (data not yet loaded) |