Guide
How to export your Kindle highlights and notes (and never lose them again)
You can export Kindle highlights and notes in two ways: from the Kindle e-reader, with the My Clippings.txt file, or from the Kindle app, which gives you one file per book. With those files you bring them into Booktation, free, next to your notes from paper books.
By Booktation · updated 2 October 2026
From the Kindle e-reader: the My Clippings.txt file
- Connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cable.
- The Kindle shows up as a drive: open the documents folder.
- Copy the My Clippings.txt file. It holds the highlights, notes and bookmarks made on that Kindle, for every book, with their dates.
The file stays on the Kindle and grows over time. If you have had more than one Kindle, each has its own.
From the Kindle app: export a book’s notes
- Open the book in the Kindle app, on your phone, tablet or computer.
- Open the list of your notes for that book, the Notebook.
- Choose to export them (“Export notes”). From a phone the file comes by email; on a computer you save it. It is an HTML file, one per book.
From the Kindle e-reader you can also email yourself a book’s notes: a PDF and a CSV file arrive. For now Booktation reads My Clippings.txt and the app’s file, not those two.
Why the export sometimes stops
For books you buy, the publisher can set a limit on how much text can be copied out of the book, often around 10%. Past the limit you still see your highlights on the Kindle, but in the file there is a notice in their place. It is a rule of Amazon and the publishers: no app gets around it.
Booktation skips these notices: they don’t become empty notes.
Bring them into Booktation, next to your paper books
- Create your Booktation account, free.
- In your Profile open Import books and notes and pick the file: My Clippings.txt or the Kindle app’s file.
- Before you confirm, you see how many books and notes are coming in.
- Each highlight becomes a note on its book; a note you typed on a highlight stays attached to it.
- If you made a highlight longer, the Kindle saves it twice: only the longest is kept.
- The page comes in when the Kindle knows it. A “location” is not a page, and we never use it as one.
- A book not yet in your library comes in as an e-book to read; a book already there gets the notes.
- If you import the same file again, the notes you already have are not repeated.
- Bookmarks don’t come in: they hold no text.
Importing is free, on every plan. Next to them, for your paper books, you add notes the way you like: a photo of the underlined page, the sentence said out loud or a couple of typed lines. It works for library books too, which you can’t mark: snap the page and tap the sentences to keep.
Take them to Word, Obsidian or Notion
From Booktation you export all your notes whenever you like, on the Free plan too, in a Markdown file, one book after another: it opens in Word and imports into Obsidian or Notion. Kindle notes and paper-book notes end up in the same file.
Coming from Goodreads or StoryGraph? Books, statuses and ratings come in the same way: see the page on the Goodreads alternative.
Frequently asked questions
Where is My Clippings.txt?
On the Kindle e-reader, in the documents folder: you see it when you connect the Kindle to your computer with the USB cable.
Can I import the same file more than once?
Yes. Notes you already have are not repeated: only the new ones come in. Handy with My Clippings.txt, which grows with every book.
Why are some highlights missing, or replaced by a notice?
For books you buy, the publisher can limit how much text can be exported. Past the limit the file has a notice instead of the sentence: Booktation skips it.
What does it cost?
Importing and exporting notes is free, on every plan.
Who sees my notes?
Only you, until you choose to show one. If you like, you show some of them to your book club, and only its members see them, or you make a copy of a note visible to the readers of the same book; you can take them back whenever you like.