Exporting Kindle Highlights for Personal Documents
I’ve long used the Send to Kindle app to upload documents for reading on my Kindle Oasis. Unlike with books, I usually don’t care about saving notes and highlights for these, so I haven’t tried doing that in a while. However, I recently read a long document where I did make extensive highlights. Then I realized that there seems to be no way to export them (other than by taking screenshots).
The problem seems to be that Kindle’s feature for e-mailing annotations only works for documents that are stored in the Amazon cloud. I didn’t realize this and had Send to Kindle set not to do this because these were ephemeral documents that I didn’t want to have to clean up later. However, now that I know this is a one-way door, in the future I will upload them to the cloud just in case.
Secondly, I had thought that it was always possible to access the highlights by connecting the Kindle to my Mac via USB and opening the My Clippings.txt file. However, for whatever reason, my Kindle no longer has this file.
Lastly, even if I upload my document to the cloud, the Kindle itself can’t e-mail the annotations. That only works for books purchased from Amazon. However, because the document is in the cloud, it can sync the highlights to my other devices, and the Kindle app for Mac does let me export them. (Annoyingly, it can’t copy/paste or save a file; I have to e-mail them to myself.) The Mac app also supports larger window sizes, so it’s easier to take screenshots to save or OCR.
I thought the discontinued Kindle Classic app might have more options, but now it’s crashing a lot on my Mac and seems unable to download documents.
Anyway, the summary is that is possible to get your data out, if you’re aware of the roundabout process.
Previously:
