Export all your Kindle highlights and notes

Sep 19, 2019

Previously, I discussed the current state of annotations in digital books and documents.

In this post, I want to introduce a tool I developed to help Kindle users handle their highlights, notes, bookmarks, etc.

Getting annotations from your Kindle

So you’ve been reading on your Kindle device. You highlighted some interesting parts. You wrote important notes. And you bookmarked relevant pages. Now how do you access it outside of the Kindle?

The Kindle has a mobile app and a web page where you can see your annotations and also export them. But whether your annotations for a particular book/document will be available there depends on how you acquired it.

I made a table to illustrate how it currently works (2019):

Got from…Mobile appWeb
Bought on Amazon
Sent via e-mail
Stored via USB

So if you bought the book from Amazon, you have the best of worlds. You can access your annotations from Amazon’s mobile app or the web.

If you sent the content to your Kindle e-mail, Amazon automatically tagged it as “personal document” (even if it is a book). Its annotations will only be available on the mobile app.

Lastly, if you added content to your Kindle via USB, bad luck. No way to access its annotations or the content out of the Kindle.

My Clippings to the rescue

So we get a somewhat fragmented experienced. Depending on how you acquired each content, its annotations are available on one place or another; and thus are easily exportable or not.

Luckily, the Kindle stores a plain text file on its documents folder called My Clippings. For each highlight, note, bookmark and clip you set while on your Kindle, it appends this file with the corresponding information.

My Clippings shortcomes

Now, this file is very handy, no doubt. But yet it is kind of a mess. As I said, it is appended whenever you do one of the above operations. This means:

Solutions available

So while having tons of valuable data, this file is not really readable nor easily browseable. The obvious thing to do was to try to parse it. I looked for applications to do that and found a few: web and desktop. However, none satisfied me:

I didn’t try all the applications available. I quickly realized that it would be much better to code my own solution from ground up, than testing many until one worked or reasonably satisfied me. Besides, I still would have to adapt them to my needs.

Meet Fyodor

So I created a tool to solve those problems. It’s Fyodor, written in Ruby and libre and open-source.

Fyodor parses all the precious data from My Clippings and makes it readable. It generates well formatted markdown files: one per book or document that you read.

Some of the features:

The workflow, pros and cons

To extract your Kindle annotations:

Advantages of this method:

Of course, we still have some limitations that the Kindle imposes us:

But yet, this is a much better state of affairs, and I’m fairly satisfied. I hope this app makes your life better. Check it out here.


Have comments? E-mail me.

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