// the take
A tiny Ruby script that logs into your Amazon account, scrapes your Kindle highlights, and emails you one at random on a schedule. Built for a single person who wants a daily nostalgia hit from their own reading notes, not a general-purpose tool.
The whole thing is small enough to read in five minutes and understand completely. It correctly accounts for Heroku's ephemeral filesystem by re-downloading highlights on every run instead of assuming persistent storage. Setup is genuinely minimal: one Heroku app, Scheduler, Mailgun, done.
It works by scraping Amazon's login and highlights pages, which Amazon changes often and increasingly gates behind CAPTCHAs and bot detection — there's no sign this still logs in successfully, and last push was 2021-01-13 with no activity since. It asks you to put your raw Amazon username and password into Heroku config vars in plaintext, which is a real credential exposure risk for an account that also has your payment methods on it. The setup instructions depend on Heroku's free dyno tier and free Mailgun add-on, both of which Heroku discontinued in 2022, so the quickstart as written no longer works.
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →