How to export your Kindle highlights (and actually use them)

If you read on a Kindle, you’ve probably got hundreds of highlights by now. Maybe thousands. They’re the passages that made you stop and think, and they’re spread across every book you’ve read on that thing, and almost none of them have been looked at since the day you made them.

Getting them out is the easy part, once you know where they live. This guide covers every way to do it, which one to pick, and why some of your highlights might be missing. Then it covers the part most guides skip, which is what to do with them afterwards, because a nicely exported file you never open again isn’t much better than the Kindle it came from.

Where your highlights actually live

Your highlights are kept in more than one place, and each place has a slightly different set of them. That’s why people get confused when a book looks complete in one spot and half empty in another.

1. A file on your Kindle called My Clippings.txt. Every highlight and note you make on an e-ink Kindle gets added to it, across every book, including PDFs and documents you sent to the device yourself.
2. Your Kindle notebook on Amazon’s website, at read.amazon.com/notebook. This collects highlights from books you bought from Amazon, synced from every Kindle device and app you’re signed into.
3. The notebook inside each book in the Kindle apps, on your phone, tablet or computer. It shows the highlights for that one book, and most versions of the apps let you export it.

Which one you use depends on where you read and what kind of books they are.

Method 1: Copy My Clippings.txt from your Kindle

This is the one to use if you read on an e-ink Kindle, like a Paperwhite, an Oasis, a Scribe or a basic Kindle. It’s free, it gets everything in one go, and it’s the only method that includes books and documents you didn’t buy from Amazon.

1. Plug your Kindle into your computer with a USB cable.
2. Open it like a USB drive. It shows up as Kindle in File Explorer on Windows, or in Finder on a Mac.
3. Open the documents folder and copy My Clippings.txt to your computer.

On a Mac, newer Kindles sometimes don’t show up in Finder at all, because of the way they connect over USB. If that happens, a free app like OpenMTP will let you browse the Kindle and copy the file off it.

The catch with My Clippings.txt is that it’s messy. Everything is in one long file, in the order you made the highlights, mixed up across books. Bookmarks are in there too. Your notes are saved as separate entries rather than next to the passage you wrote them on. And every time you stretch or shorten a highlight on the device, the Kindle saves the new version and keeps the old one as well, so you end up with near-duplicates of the passages you cared about most.

That’s exactly why we built a free tool for it. Drop your file into the Kindle clippings tool and you get your highlights back sorted by book, with your notes attached to the right passage and the duplicates cleaned up, ready to copy or download as Markdown. It runs entirely in your browser, so the file never gets uploaded anywhere.

Method 2: Use your Kindle notebook on Amazon

If you mostly read in the Kindle app on your phone, or you’ve switched devices over the years, the notebook at read.amazon.com/notebook is the place to look. Sign in with your Amazon account and you’ll see every book you’ve highlighted, with the highlights and notes for each one, synced from all your devices and apps.

There are two things to know about it:

• It only covers books from the Kindle store. PDFs, Word documents and books you sent to your Kindle yourself won’t show up here, even if you highlighted them. For those, My Clippings.txt is your only option.
• It’s built for reading, not exporting. You can scroll through your highlights and copy them by hand, but that gets tedious quickly with a long book, and publishers can limit how much you’re allowed to copy.

To get a whole book out in one go, a free bookmarklet called Bookcision (made by Readwise) runs on that page and downloads the highlights for the book you’re looking at as plain text or JSON. It works one book at a time, which is fine for the book you just finished and slow if you want your whole library.

Method 3: Export from the Kindle app

The Kindle apps for iPhone, iPad, Android and desktop have an export option built into each book’s notebook. The menus move around a bit between app versions, but it usually goes like this:

1. Open the book and tap the middle of the page to bring up the menu.
2. Open the Notebook.
3. Tap the share or export button and choose Export notebook.

On a phone you’ll usually be asked to pick a citation style (choose None if you just want the highlights) and then send it by email, which gives you an HTML file. In the desktop app you can save it straight to your computer. Some newer e-ink Kindles can do something similar from the device itself, emailing you a book’s notes as a PDF and a spreadsheet.

Like the notebook website, this works one book at a time and only for books from the Kindle store.

Why some of your highlights are missing

If you’ve exported a book and it stops partway through, you’ve probably hit the clipping limit. Publishers set a cap on how much of a book can be exported, often around 10% of it. You can keep highlighting as much as you like, and everything still shows up inside the book, but once you’re over the limit the extra highlights won’t make it into exports, the notebook website or sync tools. On an e-ink Kindle you’ll see a line in My Clippings.txt saying you’ve reached the clipping limit for that item.

There’s no way around it except highlighting a little less, which honestly isn’t the worst advice anyway. We’ll come back to that.

Which method should you use?

• You read on an e-ink Kindle: copy My Clippings.txt. It has everything, including your own documents, and the clippings tool will tidy it up.
• You read on your phone or tablet: use the notebook website or the export button in the app, one book at a time.
• You want everything synced automatically and don’t mind paying: a service like Readwise connects to your Amazon account and keeps your highlights flowing into other apps.

Exporting is the easy part

Here’s the uncomfortable bit. Once you’ve got all your highlights in a neat file, you’ll probably do nothing with them. Most people don’t. A file of 800 highlights is just as hard to use as a Kindle full of 800 highlights, because the problem was never where they were stored.

Highlights are the author’s words. They tell you what caught your eye, but not what you made of it, and three months later you won’t remember what you made of it either. The highlights that end up changing how you work are the ones you turn into something of your own.

So when you export a book, try this before you file it away:

1. Skim the highlights once, and pick the three that still matter. Not the ones that are well written, the ones that relate to something you’re actually dealing with.
2. For each one, write a single sentence in your own words about what it means for you. Not a summary of the passage. What you’d do differently because of it.
3. Keep those sentences somewhere you’ll come across them again, next to the rest of your notes, where you’ll find them when the same problem shows up.

Here’s what that looks like. A highlight from Walden: “Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.” Turned into your own note, it might become: “Half the settings in our app exist because I couldn’t decide. Every one of them is a support ticket waiting to happen.” That second sentence is the one you’ll actually use, because it’s yours and it’s about your problem.

Three notes like that from a book are worth more than three hundred highlights. That’s the whole idea behind ThinkerNotes: it keeps what you took from each book in your own words, and brings it back when it’s relevant again. If you’re on Pro, it’ll import the same My Clippings.txt file, or read your Kindle notebook with a bookmark, so you can do all of this right next to the original passages.