How to Export Kindle Highlights (All 4 Ways, From Painful to One Click)

You've highlighted hundreds of passages across years of Kindle books, and Amazon acts like you borrowed them. Getting highlights out is weirdly hard by design. Four ways, worst to best:

1. The clippings file (free, clunky, offline)

Plug your Kindle into a computer and look for documents/My Clippings.txt. Every highlight and note you've ever made, in one text file. The catch: it's a raw dump — duplicates, weird formatting, no book organization. Fine for grep, miserable for browsing. Also only includes books read on that physical device.

2. Copy-paste from the Amazon notebook (free, tedious)

Go to read.amazon.com/notebook, click a book, select-all, paste somewhere. Works, preserves nothing about formatting, and you'll do it one book at a time. I did this for about six books before deciding life is short.

3. Readwise (paid, polished)

Readwise's original product: it slurps your Amazon notebook automatically and mails you a daily digest of old highlights. Exports to Notion, Obsidian, everything. If you want highlights as a spaced-repetition practice, this is the mature product. It's ~$120/year with Reader bundled.

4. Marks (free, one click — and yes, I built it)

Marks has a Kindle sync built into its Chrome extension. Click "Sync Kindle highlights," it opens your Amazon notebook page, reads every book, and pulls all highlights and notes into your bookmark library — searchable and taggable next to your saved articles. Re-sync anytime; it picks up new highlights and sorts books by most recently highlighted.

The reason I built it this way: your highlights and your saved articles are the same thing — stuff you wanted to remember. Keeping them in two separate apps never made sense to me.

Whichever you pick

Do it this week. Amazon has closed APIs before, and the notebook page has broken scrapers before. Highlights you've exported are yours; highlights in the cloud are a policy change away from gone. (Pocket users know exactly what I mean.)