At a glance

  • There are three ways to get your Kindle highlights out: the Kindle notebook on the web, the Kindle app's export, and the My Clippings.txt file on a Kindle e-reader.
  • My Clippings.txt is the most complete. It holds every highlight made on that Kindle, including books you didn't buy from Amazon.
  • Publishers can limit how much of a book you can export, so some highlights may come out cut short.
  • A checklist at the end gets every highlight you've made into one place in an evening.

Highlights are the most personal part of a reading history. They're the lines you stopped for, the ones you wanted to keep, and the ones you meant to come back to. Most readers never do, because the highlights stay locked inside a Kindle.

Getting them out takes less time than it sounds. This means one evening, one of three methods, and a place to keep them that you'll actually open again.

Where are your Kindle highlights stored?

Your highlights live in two places, and they don't always match:

  • Amazon's servers, for books bought from Amazon. These show up in the Kindle notebook and the Kindle apps.
  • Your Kindle e-reader, in a single file called My Clippings.txt. Every highlight, note and bookmark made on that device is added to it, including books you sent to the Kindle yourself.

This means a book you added by email or USB may have highlights on your Kindle that never appear online.

How do you export highlights from the Kindle notebook?

The Kindle notebook is the quickest way to see everything at once:

  1. Go to read.amazon.com/notebook in a browser and sign in with your Amazon account.
  2. Pick a book from the list on the left.
  3. Read, copy or print the highlights shown for that book.

The notebook is good for reading your highlights back. It's slower for saving them, because it shows one book at a time.

How do you export highlights from the Kindle app?

The Kindle app can send a book's highlights as a file:

  1. Open the book in the Kindle app on your phone or tablet.
  2. Open its Notebook.
  3. Choose Share or Export, then email, and pick a citation style or none.

The highlights arrive as an HTML file attached to an email. Readers report that this works for books bought from Amazon, while some books added by file show fewer options. It's worth trying one book first.

How do you get My Clippings.txt from a Kindle?

This is the most complete export, and it takes three steps:

  1. Connect your Kindle e-reader to a computer with a USB cable.
  2. Open the Kindle like a drive, then open its documents folder.
  3. Copy My Clippings.txt to your computer.

Keep a copy somewhere safe. The file is plain text, so it opens anywhere and lasts. Every highlight sits under its book title, with the page or location and the date you made it.

Why are some highlights cut short?

Publishers can set a limit on how much of a book can be exported as highlights. When you pass it, exported highlights may be shortened or end in an ellipsis. The limit is set per book, and some books have none.

Three habits help:

  • Highlight lines, not pages. Short highlights fit under any limit.
  • Check the clippings file first. It often has more than the notebook.
  • Write down why it mattered for the passages you care about most, in your own words, so the thought survives even if the quote is cut.

Where should your highlights live?

Exporting is only half the job. Highlights are worth keeping when they sit next to the book they came from. You have three good options:

  • A notes app or document, one page per book, if you mostly want to search them.
  • A paper commonplace book, if you want to copy out your favorites by hand and slow down with them.
  • A reading app that reads your clippings file. Spinebloom imports My Clippings.txt from a Kindle e-reader: every book you highlighted comes in, dated by your last highlight, with its highlights kept on the book. The steps are in Spinebloom's Kindle guide.

This means your favorite lines stay with the book, ready for a year recap or a quote post when you want them.

What else is in My Clippings.txt?

The file is also a quiet record of your reading. Each book in it has the date of every highlight, which means you can see roughly when you read it. If you're moving reading apps, a tool that reads the file can use those dates to fill in books you never logged.

Your Kindle highlights checklist

  • Look at your highlights at read.amazon.com/notebook.
  • Copy My Clippings.txt off your Kindle e-reader and keep a backup.
  • Export the notebook from the Kindle app for one favorite book.
  • Note which books came out cut short, and write down why the lines that matter mattered.
  • Pick one home for your highlights and put every book there.

What's the one highlight you'd save first?

_Spinebloom is a reading app coming to iPhone and iPad: bring in your Goodreads, StoryGraph, Libby or Kindle history, keep your highlights with your books, and make posts from your real shelf. spinebloom.com_