Highlights
Kindle highlights, out of the device
Every Kindle keeps a plain text file of every highlight, note and bookmark you have ever made. Plug the device in, drop the file here, and get it back grouped by book, deduplicated, and in a format you can keep.
No upload· Your reading history is read in this tab and never sent or stored anywhere
Intake
Drop My Clippings.txt here
Finding the file
Connect the Kindle by USB. It appears as a drive, and My Clippings.txt is in the top-level folder — next to documents. Copy it, or drop it here straight from the device.
Add the file from more than one Kindle, or from a Kindle and a phone, and they are merged. Each clipping records which files it appeared in.
The duplicates
The device appends and never rewrites, so extending a highlight leaves the shorter version behind and re-reading a book duplicates everything. Two kinds of duplicate are removed:
- Identical entries, collapsed into one with a note of how many there were.
- A highlight fully contained in a longer one at the same location — the longer one is what you meant.
A quotation that genuinely appears twice in different places survives, because the locations do not overlap.
Other devices
This reads the Kindle format. Kobo stores annotations differently — in a database and in per-book annotation files — and support for it is not here yet, because writing a parser for a format without a real device file to test against is how you ship something that quietly loses people’s notes.