What's the single most important portability factor?

You having the file. Any tool that only 'connects live' and doesn't produce a downloadable artifact is one API change from useless. The download is the anchor.

Is JSON more portable than CSV?

Only if the schema is documented. An undocumented JSON with 40 nested fields is less portable than a boring CSV with 6 columns. Documentation is portability.

How do you evaluate a new import format?

Three tests: can a human read it in a text editor? can a tool that isn't the original vendor parse it? and is the format itself old enough to have outlived at least one 'this is dead' narrative?

Which of the Konshus imports scores highest on portability?

My Clippings.txt (Kindle) — it's plain text, self-explanatory, and works even if Amazon closes tomorrow. It's a good baseline for what portability looks like.

A rubric · ~5 min read

What Makes an Import Portable?

Any tool can call itself "open" or "portable." What that actually means is a lot narrower than the marketing implies. Three tests, applied to every source a memory tool touches, sort the portable from the pretending-to-be.

Test 1 — Can a human read it?

Open the file in a plain text editor. If what you see is human-legible — even if messy — the format has cleared the first bar. Markdown, plain text, CSV, XML, and readable JSON all pass. Proprietary binary formats fail immediately.

The Kindle My Clippings.txt is the gold standard: open it in Notepad and every highlight is right there, one after the other, in a format anyone can grasp in 30 seconds.

Test 2 — Can a non-vendor tool parse it?

The format is only as portable as the ecosystem of tools that read it. ENEX passes because a dozen independent tools import ENEX. Substack's paid-post format fails because only Substack renders it correctly.

This is why Bear's ENEX and Evernote's ENEX are both usable even though the two apps otherwise share nothing — the format has an existence outside either vendor.

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Test 3 — Has it outlived at least one death narrative?

Every format has a moment when someone confidently declares it dead. RSS "died" in 2013. Email "died" every year of the 2010s. ENEX "died" the year Evernote's business went sideways. The formats that came back stronger after those narratives are the ones worth building on — because they demonstrated that no single vendor's decisions can kill them.

The corollary: brand-new "portable" formats that haven't been through a death narrative are the highest-risk. They might survive. They also might not.

How Konshus scores its sources

Top tier (all three tests pass, comfortably): Kindle My Clippings.txt, RSS/Atom feeds, plain markdown from Obsidian, ENEX from Bear.
Second tier (pass with caveats): Apple Books text exports (readable, but export process is manual), ChatGPT ZIP export (parseable, but Amazon-owned Anthropic-owned format), Strava CSV (great columns, but the sport codes need lookup tables).
Third tier (portable in principle, dependent in practice): X archive (files land, but the format has changed twice in three years), Spotify extended history (JSON is fine, schema is undocumented).
Not portable (avoid or wrap): any "live" API-only integration where no user-downloadable file exists.

Everything Konshus imports is designed to work off an actual file you can also keep on your own disk. Even the live connections ultimately produce artifacts you can export.

Frequently asked

Frequently Asked Questions

Portability is a property, not a promise

A tool that only 'connects live' is one API change from useless. Every Konshus source starts with a file you keep.

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