How to archive all your Kindle notes and highlights

Would you like to be able to download all your notes and highlights from your Kindle books? Amazon doesn’t make it easy, but here’s the workaround way to get your notes and highlights.

1) Sign into your online kindle account. Go to: https://kindle.amazon.com and sign in.

How to download your Kindle notes: Step 1

2) Find the book you want to copy your notes from. In this case my book is in the “read” section, so I clicked the number next to “read” (It’s currently 9, because I’ve finished nine books on the kindle)

How to download your Kindle notes: Step 2

3) Click on the book title

How to download your Kindle notes: Step 3

4) Click on “You have 62 highlighted passages You have 61 notes” found in the upper right.

How to download your Kindle notes: Step 4

5) All your highlights and notes from this book will appear on this page. Go ahead and copy them. Then paste the text into a document somewhere else.

How to download your Kindle notes: Step 5

As you can see, Amazon doesn’t allow a simple download for the notes. Instead I copied them from my Kindle profile. You can only do the following with your own notes and highlights.

If you wanted to read a friend’s notes and highlights on a book, you are out of luck. I would really like Amazon to enable more sharing of notes. It would be fantastic to read a book with someone and then have conversations over passages in the book via the notes.

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6 thoughts on “How to archive all your Kindle notes and highlights”

    1. Thanks Ryan! I like your script. I’ll give it a shot. It’s especially nice how you give different format options when to download the data (plain text, JSON, XML).

  1. Hi Matt,

    One of the most popular functions of the Kindle is the ability to highlight passages and make some notes. I agree though that Amazon hasn’t made it easier to access them. There is an iOS app though that will be released on November 2013 that might make things easier. Snippefy (www.snippefy.com) is an app that will make it convenient for Kindle users to read and share their notes and highlights. They will also have the option to share these in social media instantly or schedule them out. These notes and highlights can also be exported to Evernote, Dropbox and emails.

    I thought I would share this with you and your readers and hope you will find it helpful.

    Thank you

    Nathan

    1. Thanks Nathan! I look forward to this app. I hope that Amazon doesn’t pull it down immediately. They have been known to do this in the past with other apps that open up the kindle comments.

  2. Pingback: For creators, searchers, readers, and curators | Matt Maldre

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