How to export your Kindle highlights and notes
Four ways to get your Kindle highlights and notes out of Amazon: the Kindle notebook, Export Notebook in the app, My Clippings.txt and sync tools.
· 5 min read
In short
- Highlights from books you bought on Amazon are all listed in your Kindle notebook at read.amazon.com/notebook, where you can read and copy them.
- The Kindle app on a phone or tablet can email you a book's highlights and notes as a file: open the book's notebook and choose Export Notebook.
- Kindle e-readers also keep every highlight, including those in your own documents, in a plain text file called My Clippings.txt.
- Publishers can limit how much of a book can be exported, so a very long list of highlights from one book may come out incomplete.
On this page (7)
Highlighting on a Kindle takes a second: hold, drag, let go. Getting those passages back out, all of them, in a form you can use, is less obvious. Amazon offers several ways, each of which covers part of the job, and none of them is called “Export everything”.
This guide goes through the four ways that work today, what each one gives you and where it stops, so you can pick the one that fits what you want to do with your highlights.
Where your Kindle highlights are kept
When you highlight a passage in a book you bought from the Kindle Store, the highlight is saved to your Amazon account and synced to your other devices. That is why it shows up in the Kindle app on your phone, and why Amazon can list it online.
Books and documents that didn't come from the store behave differently. Highlights in personal documents, whether sent with Send to Kindle or copied over by cable, usually stay on the device where you made them. They don't appear in Amazon's online list, but a Kindle e-reader keeps them in a file of its own (more on that below).
So the first question is simply: did the book come from Amazon? If it did, every method below works. If highlights from a store book are missing, see Kindle highlights not syncing.
Method 1: The Kindle notebook in your browser
Amazon keeps a page for your highlights and notes called the Kindle notebook. It lists every book you have highlighted and, for each one, every highlight and note in order, with its location and colour.
- Open read.amazon.com/notebook on a computer. Amazon has a local address in some countries, for example lesen.amazon.de/notebook in Germany or read.amazon.co.uk/notebook in the UK.
- Sign in with the Amazon account your Kindle uses.
- Choose a book in the list on the left. Its highlights and notes appear on the right.
- Select the passages you want, copy them and paste them into a document.
The notebook is the best place to see everything at once, and your notes appear right beside the highlights they belong to. What it lacks is an export button: you copy one book at a time, and the formatting rarely survives the trip into another program.
Method 2: Export Notebook in the Kindle app
The Kindle app for iPhone, iPad and Android can send you a book's highlights and notes as a file. It is the closest thing to a real export that Amazon offers.
- Open the book in the Kindle app and tap the middle of the page to show the menus.
- Open the notebook (the icon that looks like a page with lines).
- Tap the share icon and choose Export Notebook.
- Pick a citation style. “None” gives you the plain text; APA, Chicago and MLA add a reference to the book.
- Send it to yourself by email.
You receive an HTML file that opens in any browser and copies cleanly into a document. The app's menus move around between versions, so if a step looks different, look for the notebook first: the export always starts there.
Like the notebook page, this works one book at a time and only for books from the Kindle Store, and it is subject to the publisher's export limit described below.
Method 3: My Clippings.txt on a Kindle e-reader
Every Kindle e-reader writes your highlights, notes and bookmarks into a plain text file as you make them. Because the file lives on the device, it includes highlights from personal documents too.
- Connect your Kindle to a computer with a USB cable.
- Open the Kindle drive and then the documents folder.
- Copy My Clippings.txt to your computer.
Each entry has the book's title and author, a line with the page or location and the date, the highlighted text, and a row of equals signs that separates it from the next entry. Any text editor opens it, and many tools can read it.
Why some highlights come out cut short
Publishers decide how much of a book can be copied out of it, and Amazon applies that limit wherever highlights leave the book. In the Kindle notebook, a book that has reached its limit shows a notice that some highlights are hidden or truncated. In My Clippings.txt, entries past the limit read “You have reached the clipping limit for this item” instead of the text.
The share varies from book to book and isn't published. Most readers never notice it, because it only matters when you highlight a large part of a single book. Your highlights aren't lost: they remain in the book itself, and you can still read them on your Kindle.
If it happens to you, two habits help: highlight a sentence rather than a page, and for passages that matter, add a note in your own words. The limit is about the book's text, and a note is yours.
Method 4: Tools that do it for you
Copying book by book is fine once. If you want your highlights somewhere else for good, several services read your Kindle notebook for you and keep up with new highlights, among them Readwise, Glasp and Clippings.io. They differ mostly in what they do with your highlights afterwards: notes apps, flashcards, sharing.
Afterthought is one of these tools, with a single purpose. Its Chrome extension opens your Kindle notebook in your own browser, where you are already signed in to Amazon, and brings your highlights and notes into your Afterthought library. It never asks for your Amazon password. In your account you can download everything as a file at any time. Like every tool that reads the notebook, it sees what Amazon shows there, export limits included.
Which method should you use?
- For one book, once: Export Notebook in the Kindle app. You get a clean file in a minute.
- To look through everything: the Kindle notebook at read.amazon.com/notebook.
- For personal documents and sideloaded books: My Clippings.txt from your Kindle e-reader.
- To keep your highlights somewhere for good: a tool that syncs your notebook regularly.
Getting your highlights out is the first step. If you are wondering what to do with them next, we collected seven ideas for your Kindle highlights.
