How to export your Kindle highlights

Your Kindle keeps every passage you highlight. Getting them out is less obvious. This guide shows two ways to do it, both free, and what each one is good for.

Before you start

Which method you use depends on where your books came from:

Books bought from Amazon	Books you added yourself (sideloaded)
Method 1 or Method 2	Method 1 only

Amazon’s online notebook only shows highlights from books bought in the Kindle Store. The file on the device includes everything.

Method 1: Copy the My Clippings file over USB

Every Kindle e-reader saves your highlights and notes to a plain text file called My Clippings.txt.

1. Connect your Kindle to your computer with a USB cable.
2. Open the Kindle drive. On Windows it shows up in File Explorer. On a Mac it shows up in Finder. (Some newer Kindles do not show up on a Mac by default. Amazon’s help pages list the current way to connect them.)
3. Open the documents folder.
4. Copy My Clippings.txt to your computer.

That file is your full highlight history, from every book, in the order you made them. It is plain text, so you can open it in any text editor.

Good to know:

• If you delete a highlight on the Kindle, it stays in My Clippings.txt. The file only grows.
• Some publishers limit how much of a book you can highlight. Past that limit, the file shows a short note instead of the text.
• The Kindle phone apps do not create this file. It only exists on Kindle e-readers.

Method 2: Use the Kindle notebook in your browser

1. Go to read.amazon.com/notebook and sign in with your Amazon account.
2. Pick a book from the list on the left.
3. Your highlights and notes for that book show on the right.

From here you can read them or copy them by hand. There is no single export button for all books at once. Some browser extensions add one, but read what data they ask for before you install one.

The Kindle app on phones and tablets has a notebook view too. In many versions you can export or share one book’s highlights from there, for example by email.

Which method should you use?

• You want everything, including sideloaded books: use My Clippings.txt.
• You want one Amazon book, quickly: use the notebook in your browser or in the Kindle app.
• You read on a Kindle app only, not an e-reader: use the notebook. There is no clippings file.

What to do with the file

My Clippings.txt is complete but messy. Highlights from all your books are mixed together, and duplicates pile up when you edit a highlight.

If you want them sorted by book and free of duplicates, Highlit can import the file directly. It merges duplicate highlights, keeps everything on your device and does not need an account. You can back everything up to a plain JSON file whenever you like.