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How to export Kindle highlights: every route in 2026

By Nico, Founder of Becoming · Published

Kindle keeps your highlights in three places at once, and none of them is a file you can simply download. This guide covers how to export Kindle highlights from each of them: the Kindle Notebook on the web, the My Clippings.txt file on the device, the export option in the Kindle app, and the Goodreads link. It then shows how Becoming (our product) brings the same highlights in without the copying.

Every Amazon fact below was checked against Amazon’s own help pages on the date in the Sources section. Where Amazon publishes nothing, the guide says so rather than repeating what other blogs claim.

Where Kindle stores your highlights

Amazon’s sync settings page describes the mechanism: Sync, on by default on every Kindle device and app, backs up your reading position, notes and highlights to Amazon’s servers, and that copy is what every other Kindle app and device reads. The same page adds two facts that matter for exporting:

  • Notes, highlights and bookmarks made while Sync is off may be lost when you turn it back on, and Export/Share for notes is unavailable while it is off.
  • Anything you do in Kindle for Web (read.amazon.com) keeps saving to Amazon’s servers even with Sync off, but does not reach your other devices.

So the cloud copy is the one most tools read, the device keeps its own local record, and the app can send you a third. Each route below starts from one of those.

Route 1: the Kindle Notebook at read.amazon.com/notebook

The Kindle Notebook is Amazon’s web page for your synced highlights, at read.amazon.com/notebook. It sits behind an Amazon sign-in, so this guide could not load it to confirm what the page offers today; Amazon’s help pages describe only the in-book notebook of Kindle for Web, a single list of highlights, notes and bookmarks where each item jumps to its page and a trash icon deletes it.

What the Notebook page reliably gives you is a per-book view of everything that synced, which you can read and copy. Two limits, both documented in the Becoming help center:

  • Books that never synced to the cloud, side-loaded documents most often, do not appear. If a book is missing, open the Notebook and check whether it is there before blaming any tool.
  • The page shows a limited number of highlights per book on screen. Tools that read it, Becoming included, page past that display limit.

Copying by hand from the Notebook works for one book. For a library, it is what the third-party tools and Becoming automate.

Route 2: My Clippings.txt on the Kindle device

Every Kindle e-reader keeps a plain-text file, My Clippings.txt, and appends every highlight and note to it as you make them. Because it is written on the device, it includes books that never synced, which makes it the most complete record a physical Kindle has.

To get it:

  1. Connect the Kindle to your computer with a USB cable.
  2. Open the Kindle as a drive and go to the documents folder.
  3. Copy My Clippings.txt to your computer.

Its limits are the reverse of the Notebook’s. The file only knows what was highlighted on that device, so highlights made in the phone app are not in it. It is append-only, so a highlight you later deleted is still there. Its language follows the device setting, which matters to any tool that parses it. And Amazon’s help pages document neither the file nor the per-book cap that readers report seeing in it as a line reading “You have reached the clipping limit for this item” in place of a highlight; that cap is set per title, and Amazon publishes no figure for it.

Route 3: Export notes from the Kindle app

The Kindle apps for iPhone and Android can send you a book’s notes and highlights by email from the book’s notebook view. Amazon’s help pages confirm the feature exists, as the “Export/Share for notes” option that needs Sync on, but publish no article describing the formats or the steps, so check the share menu in your version of the app. Amazon’s only documented email export is for the Kindle Scribe: annotations and notebooks go out by email, and the download link expires after seven days.

Whatever the format, the export is one book at a time, and the result is an email attachment, not a library.

Route 4: Goodreads

If you link your Amazon and Goodreads accounts, Goodreads shows a Kindle Notes & Highlights section where, in Goodreads’ words, you can “revisit all of your notes and highlights in one place and choose which ones to share and discuss on Goodreads”. It is a viewing and sharing surface, not an export: nothing on the linking page offers a file. Goodreads’ help article on the feature is rendered by script and could not be read for this guide, so regional limits are not covered here.

Becoming’s own Goodreads import works differently, from a public profile URL: it brings in your shelves and adds popular quotes to books you have read. It does not carry your Kindle highlights, which come through the routes below.

Third-party tools that read the Notebook

Most highlight managers read the Kindle Notebook for you rather than asking for a file:

  • Readwise lists Kindle among its import sources and syncs highlights on to note apps. Our comparison is Becoming as a Readwise alternative.
  • Clippings.io imports through a browser extension or a My Clippings.txt upload and exports to Word, PDF, Notion and more. See Becoming as a Clippings.io alternative.
  • Screvi imports through an extension, its mobile apps or a My Clippings.txt file, with a daily automatic sync.

The roundup of the best Readwise alternatives compares them on price and sources.

How to export Kindle highlights into Becoming

Becoming is a highlight manager with a second half. The first half is the familiar one: Kindle, Readwise, Goodreads, Apple Books, Kobo, PDFs, web articles, YouTube and X in one library, search by meaning and a Daily Review. The second is The Academy, which turns those highlights into four-week Themes with a two-minute daily Practice. For Kindle, two routes cover the two places the highlights live.

Sync the Kindle Notebook from the app or the Chrome extension

The Becoming app and the Becoming Chrome extension both read your Kindle Notebook. On desktop, per the help center:

  1. Sign in to the Becoming web app, and to Amazon at read.amazon.com in the same browser.
  2. In your library choose Add source and pick Kindle, which opens the Connect Kindle screen.
  3. Click Install Extension. If the extension is not installed yet, this opens the Chrome Web Store; add it, come back and click again.
  4. A Syncing Kindle highlights dialog runs while Becoming fetches the Notebook in the background. Your books, highlights and notes appear when it finishes.

The one Chrome extension also saves web articles, YouTube videos and X posts, so it earns its place after the Kindle sync.

Upload My Clippings.txt

For a physical Kindle, or for books that never synced, choose Add source, pick MyClippings.txt and select the file. Becoming previews the books it found and imports the highlighted passages; standalone notes in the file are skipped. It reads the format in English, Spanish, German and Japanese, so a Kindle set to any of those parses correctly.

What comes across, and what happens next time

  • Books with title, author and cover.
  • Highlights, every highlighted passage per book.
  • Notes you attached to highlights on Kindle, alongside the highlight.

A re-sync is something you run yourself when you have new highlights; Becoming does not yet sync Kindle on its own. When you do, it detects highlights already imported and adds only new ones, and the same content check keeps a passage from appearing twice if it arrived once from the Notebook and once from My Clippings.txt. If the Notebook sync looks capped for a book, the help center’s fallback is the clippings file, which has no cloud limit.

Once inside, a Kindle highlight behaves like every other: it turns up in search by meaning next to a line from an article or a video, it comes back in the Daily Review in the app and by email, and on The Academy it is part of what Becoming reads when it proposes a Theme. How to apply what you read is about why that last step matters more than the export.

Kindle sync and the clippings import are part of The Library, at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year with a 7-day free trial; The Academy is $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year. The pricing section has the plans, and the Becoming help center has the step-by-step.

Sources

Checked on September 23, 2026: