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My Clippings.txt, explained

Every Kindle keeps a plain text file recording every highlight, note, and bookmark you've ever made on the device. It's the most complete record of your reading life that exists — and Amazon barely acknowledges it. Here's everything worth knowing.

Where it is

Connect your Kindle over USB and open it as a drive: the file is at documents/My Clippings.txt. It's ordinary UTF-8 text — you can open it in any editor.

What's inside

Entries separated by a line of ten equals signs, each looking like:

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
- Your Highlight on page 27 | location 412-414 | Added on Monday, March 3, 2026 09:14:02

Play iterated games. All the returns in life come from compound interest.
==========

Four parts: title and author, a metadata line (page and/or location, timestamp), the highlighted text, the separator. Notes you type appear as their own entries ("Your Note"), positioned near the highlight they annotate. Non-English Kindles write the metadata line in their own language — Spanish devices write "Tu subrayado en la página…" — which trips up naive parsers.

The three things nobody tells you

1. It includes everything — even books Amazon doesn't know about

Sideloaded EPUBs, personal PDFs, library loans: if you highlighted it on the device, it's in the file. Amazon's own notebook page only shows purchases.

2. Deleting a book doesn't delete its clippings

Entries persist after the book is gone — the file is append-only in normal use. Old highlights from books you removed years ago are still in there.

3. The Kindle silently truncates it

The dangerous one. When the file grows large or storage runs low, the device can trim it from the top — oldest highlights first, no warning, no undo. If your only copy of five years of highlights is the file on the device, you're one firmware cleanup away from losing the early years. Copy the file off the device periodically — or use a tool that does it on every plug-in. (Rereader archives every distinct version of the file it ever sees, precisely because of this behavior — how its Kindle import works.)

Editing and parsing it

It's plain text, so edit away — just keep the ========== separators intact; every parser keys on them. Quirks a good parser must handle: edited highlights appearing twice (the longer version should win), notes needing to attach to overlapping highlights, bookmarks worth skipping, and abbreviated location ranges like 1245-52 meaning 1245–1252.

From file to habit

The file is an archive; the point of highlighting was to meet those passages again. That's the job of resurfacing — a few old highlights per day, by email or on your Mac — without turning your books into flashcards.