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View your Kindle highlights on a Mac

Four ways to see everything you've highlighted, from quick-and-cloudy to a proper local library — and what each one can't show you.

1. Amazon's notebook page

Go to read.amazon.com/notebook and sign in. Books listed on the left, highlights on the right. Fastest way to peek — but it only shows books bought on that Amazon account (no sideloads, no library loans), it's per-book with no global search, and it exists at Amazon's pleasure.

2. The Kindle app for Mac

Open a book, click the notebook icon, see that book's highlights in the margin. Fine while re-reading one title; useless for "show me everything I've marked about attention across forty books."

3. Read the file directly

Plug in your Kindle, open the device in Finder, and open documents/My Clippings.txt in any text editor. Complete — every book, including sideloads — but raw: one long scroll with duplicate edited highlights and bookmarks mixed in. Good for spot checks and backups (and do back it up); not a reading experience.

4. A real local library

What you actually want: every highlight from every source in one searchable, browsable place on your own machine. That's Rereader — plug in the Kindle and it builds the library automatically:

• Library view — every book with its cover, highlight and note counts, filter-as-you-type
• Full-text search — across all highlights, notes, titles, and authors, instant
• Notes attached where they belong, editable, taggable
• Everything offline, in a database you own, exportable to Markdown/JSON

And because looking things up is only half the point, it also sends five highlights back to you every morning — the difference between an archive and a habit.

Quick comparison