Kindle highlights viewer
Drop in the My Clippings.txt file from your Kindle to see every highlight and note, sorted by book. Search them, copy them, or export them for Notion, Obsidian or Anki. The file never leaves your browser.
- 1Connect your Kindle with a USB cable
On your computer, the Kindle shows up as a drive. On a Mac, newer Kindles need a file transfer app such as OpenMTP.
- 2Open the Kindle drive, then documents
My Clippings.txt is in there. It holds every highlight, note and bookmark you’ve made on this Kindle.
- 3Drop the file on this page
Or click Choose file and pick it from the documents folder.
There’s no clippings file. Your highlights are at read.amazon.com/notebook.
Turn what you highlight into questions
Save an article to Bundle and highlight as you read. Afterward it asks you a few questions about it, and keeps the answers you want as cards.
Where to find your Kindle highlights
A Kindle e-reader saves every highlight, note and bookmark you make in one plain text file, My Clippings.txt. Connect the Kindle to your computer with a USB cable, open the Kindle drive, then the documents folder, and it’s there.
If you read in the Kindle app on a phone, tablet or computer, there’s no clippings file. Your highlights sync to read.amazon.com/notebook instead, sorted by book.
How to export them
Drop My Clippings.txt on this page, pick one book or all of them, and press Export. You get three formats.
Markdown is plain text with a heading for each book. Paste it into Notion, or save it in your Obsidian vault.
CSV opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets, with one highlight per row. The Anki file makes a card for each highlight, with the highlight on the front and the book and author on the back.
How to turn off Popular Highlights
Popular Highlights are the passages other readers marked most, underlined in the book with a count. They aren’t in your clippings file, but they pull your eye while you read. To hide them on a Kindle:
- Open a book and tap the top of the screen.
- Tap Aa, then More.
- Turn off Popular Highlights.
Why My Clippings has duplicates
The file only ever grows. When you change a highlight, say by dragging it to take in one more sentence, the Kindle adds a new entry and keeps the old one. Deleting a highlight doesn’t remove its entry either.
This viewer drops exact copies, and when one highlight sits inside another at the same spot, it keeps the one you saved last. It tells you how many it removed. Highlights you deleted on the Kindle look like the rest, so they still show up.
Highlights you never read again
Highlighting a passage feels like learning it, but a few weeks later you may not remember the passage or that you marked it. A 2013 review of ten study methods by John Dunlosky and colleagues rated highlighting and rereading low. It rated two high: testing yourself, and spreading your practice over days. For a highlight, that means trying to recall it a few days later.
Export your best highlights to Anki to review them, or read how to remember what you read for three small habits that help.