What to do with your Kindle highlights: 7 ideas
You highlighted hundreds of passages and never looked at them again. Seven ways to turn your Kindle highlights into something you actually use.
· 3 min read
In short
- Most Kindle highlights are never seen again after the day they were made.
- The simplest use is also the most rewarding: reread them, a few at a time, long after you finished the book.
- Highlights are raw material too: for a commonplace book, for your own writing, for conversations and for choosing what to read next.
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Open your Kindle notebook and scroll. Chances are there are hundreds of passages in there, from books you loved, books you abandoned and books you barely remember. Each one was a small moment of “yes, this”. Most of them haven't been looked at since.
That is a waste of good sentences. Here are seven ways to put them to use, from two minutes a week to small projects. If your highlights are still locked inside Amazon, start with how to export your Kindle highlights.
1. Reread them, a few at a time
Reading two hundred highlights in one sitting is tiring, and the best ones drown in the rest. Five at a time is different. Each passage gets your full attention, and a sentence you marked two years ago often lands differently today: sometimes it is even better, sometimes you wonder what you saw in it. Both are worth knowing.
Rereading is also how highlights stick. Memory research consistently finds that coming back to something after a pause does more than any amount of reviewing at once, as we describe in how to remember what you read.
2. Start a commonplace book
For centuries, readers copied the passages they wanted to keep into a notebook of their own, often sorted by subject. A Kindle makes the first step effortless, since every highlight is already a candidate. The second step is choosing: copy over only the ones that still matter when you meet them again.
A notebook, a document or a notes app all work. What matters is that it is yours and that you return to it. More in the commonplace book.
3. Add the note you didn't write
Most highlights come without a note, because a note takes longer than a highlight and you wanted to keep reading. When a passage comes back to you later, take the moment you didn't take then: one line on why it mattered or what it reminds you of.
On a Kindle you can add a note to an existing highlight at any time: open the book, tap the highlight and choose Note. Over time the notes become the most personal part of your library. More in how to take notes on a Kindle.
4. Use them as raw material for writing
If you write anything, whether essays, a newsletter, talks or even long emails, your highlights are a library of arguments, examples and lines you already know are good. Before you start on a topic, search your highlights for it. You will often find you have been collecting material for years without knowing it.
Quote briefly, name the book and the author, and let the passage support your thought rather than replace it.
6. Let them choose your next book
Read through a year's worth of highlights and patterns appear: the same questions, the same kind of sentence, an author quoted again and again in other people's books. Those are better reading recommendations than any algorithm's. Follow the references, read the book an author keeps mentioning, return to a subject you keep circling.
7. Sum up a book in ten passages
When you finish a book, go through your highlights from it and pick the ten that carry it best. Put them in order and read them as a short version of the book. It takes a quarter of an hour, it is a better summary than most reviews, and the act of choosing fixes the book in your memory.
Months later, those ten passages are what you will want to reread, a light version of rereading the whole book. Whatever you do with your highlights, that is the point: not to collect them, but to meet them again.
