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How to export your Kindle highlights

There are four real ways to get highlights off a Kindle, and each one misses something different. Here's all of them, ranked by completeness.

1. My Clippings.txt over USB — the complete one

Every highlight, note, and bookmark you make on the device lands in a plain text file: documents/My Clippings.txt. Connect your Kindle to a computer with a data cable, open the device in Finder or Explorer, and copy the file out. This is the only method that includes sideloaded books, personal documents, and library loans — everything Amazon's cloud page pretends doesn't exist.

2. Amazon's notebook page — the convenient one

Go to read.amazon.com/notebook, sign in, and pick a book: your highlights appear with export options per book. Convenient, but limited to books bought on that Amazon account, subject to per-book export limits set by publishers, and book-by-book only — there's no "export everything" button.

3. The Kindle app's share/export — the occasional one

The Kindle apps (and newer device firmware) can email a book's notebook as a file. Fine for one book after you finish it; impractical as a way to get your whole history.

4. Third-party tools — the automated one

Tools like Readwise scrape the notebook page in your browser on a schedule, inheriting its limits (Amazon-purchased books only). Local tools read My Clippings.txt instead. Rereader does the latter automatically: plug in the Kindle and everything imports, every time, with the clippings file archived against truncation — how its imports work.

Which should you use?

If you want the export to do something — like come back to you as a daily email — that's exactly what Rereader is for.