How to export Kindle highlights

Where do Kindle highlights live?

In three places. On the device, every highlight is appended to a plain text file called My Clippings.txt, whether the book came from the store or was sideloaded. For store-bought books, highlights also sync to your Amazon account and appear in the web notebook and in the Kindle app. For sideloaded books — PDFs, EPUBs you converted, documents you emailed — the text file is the only record.

The four routes, compared

1. My Clippings.txt over USB

1. Connect the Kindle to a computer with a USB cable and, if asked on the device, allow the connection.
2. Open the Kindle drive and the documents folder.
3. Copy My Clippings.txt to your computer.
4. Open it in any text editor. Each entry has the book title and author, the type (highlight, note, bookmark), the location and page if known, the date, and the text, separated by a line of equals signs.

The file never shrinks — deleting a highlight on the device does not remove it from the file — so it is also a history. Its weakness is formatting: a parsing tool turns it into one clean document per book.

2. Export Notebook on the device

1. Open the book and tap the top of the screen for the toolbar.
2. Open the notebook (the icon that looks like a page with lines).
3. Tap Export Notebook, choose PDF or CSV, and enter an email address.

Amazon emails the file. Some publishers cap exported highlights at a share of the book, so a heavily highlighted title may come back incomplete; the text file has no such cap.

3. The Kindle web notebook

Sign in at read.amazon.com/notebook. Every store-bought book with highlights is listed on the left; click one to see them all with locations. Copy and paste into wherever your notes live. For many books at once, Bookcision (a free bookmarklet) exports the page you are viewing as text, JSON or XML.

4. Parsing tools

clippings.io uploads My Clippings.txt and returns organised, per-book exports. Readwise imports from the web notebook or the file, resurfaces highlights daily, and forwards to Notion, Obsidian and others, for a subscription. For most readers the free routes are enough; the tools earn their place when you highlight hundreds of passages a month.

Locations, pages and what gets lost

Most exports carry Kindle locations rather than page numbers. A location is about 128 bytes of text, roughly 16 to a print page, so divide by 16 for a rough page or use percent × the print page count. Notes you typed attach to their highlight in the text file and the notebook export. What is lost in every route: the highlight colour (in the text file) and, for sideloaded books, everything unless you use route one.

Common questions