How to export your Kindle highlights

Where your highlights live

• Your Kindle notebook. Amazon's web page with every book you bought and highlighted, your highlights and your notes. In the US it is read.amazon.com/notebook. Each Amazon store has its own address: read.amazon.co.uk, read.amazon.co.jp, lesen.amazon.de and so on.
• The Kindle app. Every book has its own notebook with the same highlights.
• My Clippings.txt. A plain text file on every Kindle e-reader that records what you highlight on that device.

Method 1: Read them in the Kindle notebook

Sign in at your store's notebook address, pick a book on the left, and your highlights appear with their location and any note you added. Getting the text out of the page means copying it by hand, book by book, unless a tool reads the page for you. If the publisher's limit was reached, the page says so.

Method 2: Export from the Kindle app

Open the book in the Kindle app, open its notebook and tap the share button. On a phone the export goes out by email as an HTML file, and you can add a citation style such as APA. It is one book per export, and the publisher's limit applies here too.

Method 3: Copy My Clippings.txt off your Kindle

Connect a Kindle e-reader to a computer with a USB cable, open the documents folder and copy My Clippings.txt. It holds every highlight made on that device in one long running file, including those in personal documents. It knows nothing about what you highlighted in the app on your phone. Past the publisher's limit, it records a notice instead of the text.

Why some highlights are cut off

Publishers decide how much of a book may be exported, and Amazon enforces it. The limit is set per book and is often somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the text. Past it, highlights come out shortened or not at all. They are still there when you open the book on your Kindle; they just can't leave it.

Every tool that reads your notebook, Scriptorio included, gets the same capped text. What a tool can do is tell you which books are affected instead of quietly dropping lines.

Why some books are missing

• Books you didn't buy from Amazon. Documents you sent with Send to Kindle or copied over USB don't appear in the notebook. Their highlights are in My Clippings.txt, or in the Kindle app's export for that document.
• The wrong store. Your notebook lives on the Amazon store you bought from. If you shop on amazon.co.uk, read.amazon.com shows no books.

Exporting is the easy part

A file of highlights is where most of them go to be forgotten. The point of keeping a line is to have it again when it matters: next to the passage from another book that says the same thing, or in front of you a week from now, before it fades.

Bring them into Scriptorio

1. Choose Import from Kindle. The app offers it when you set it up, and later you find it under Profile → Settings.
2. Pick your Amazon store. Thirteen are supported: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil and Mexico.
3. Sign in on Amazon's own page. Scriptorio never sees your password and reads your notebook, nothing else.
4. Choose the books, all of them or just a few.
5. Scriptorio saves every highlight with its book, author and location, keeps your Kindle notes alongside, and works out how each passage connects to the rest of your library. If a publisher's limit cut a book short, the summary names it.

Run the import again later and only the new highlights come across.

What happens to them

• Connections across books. Passages from different books that circle the same idea appear side by side, with one line on what they share. If the app misses a link, you can draw it yourself.
• They come back. Spaced repetition on your own highlights, until the ideas stay.
• One shelf. Your Kindle highlights sit next to the pages you photograph and the passages you save from Safari or Books.
• On your device. Text recognition and the analysis behind the connections run on your iPhone. Your notes are not sent to a third-party AI service.