As much as I love the Kindle that I received this past Christmas, there are certain things that I have found wanting. Recently one of my Facebook friends asked me what books I had on my Kindle. I thought, “This should be a no brainer,  I’ll just export the list from the http://kindle.amazon.com as a CSV and send it off to her.” That would be great, except that the current “Manager Your Kindle” portal does not have an export feature of any kind. Then I had an epiphany; I used to use a cool e-reader app for Linux…What was it called…Oh yes, Calibre! So as any committed Ubuntu user would do I fired up the Ubuntu Software Center and found it and a couple of clicks later I had it installed on my desktop. Then I noticed there was not an export option in the GUI. Oh no! But wait, Google is my friend and I have a lot of confidence in my friend. I then ran across this handy little guide
that documents how you can access the Calibre database from the command line. Oh yes, geek heaven! Then all I had to do was to run the list command and I just had it return title and author in a nice fixed-column width format and piped it to a text file and sent to my Facebook friend.

So what is the moral of this story? You will inevitably run into obstacles when your are attempting to solve a problem. The point is to continue to divide and conquer and never give up until achieve your objective.

P.S. I’m still curious as to why as something so basic as an export function is lacking in the Amazon Kindle portal.