Get your Kindle highlights out — without paying for Readwise

The file most Kindle owners don't know exists

Plug a Kindle e-reader into your computer with USB. Open the drive. Look in the documents/ folder. There's a file called My Clippings.txt.

Every highlight you've ever made, every note you've typed, every bookmark — all of it, in plain text, going back to the day you bought the device.

Amazon never advertises this. Readwise built a company on top of it. But the raw file is right there, free, offline, yours.

What the file looks like inside

Each entry is a block separated by ==========, like this:

The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
- Your Highlight on Location 1234-1236 | Added on Sunday, March 3, 2024 8:14:22 PM

Play long-term games with long-term people.
==========

Nice, greppable, machine-readable. Awful to read as a single 8-megabyte file.

The problem it creates

By book #20 your My Clippings.txt has thousands of blocks in chronological order, not by book. If you want "all my highlights from Range by David Epstein," you have to grep, then eyeball. If you want them nicely formatted with the book title as a heading, the location as metadata, and each highlight as a blockquote — you're writing a script.

Kindle Clippings to Markdown is that script, as a web page.

The workflow

1. Plug your Kindle in via USB.
2. Copy documents/My Clippings.txt to your desktop.
3. Drop it into Kindle Clippings to Markdown.
4. Download the ZIP.
5. Unzip into your Obsidian vault, Notion database, or a folder called /highlights.

You now have one .md file per book, with:

• Book title as an H1
• Author on the second line
• A count of clippings
• Each highlight as a blockquote with location and date underneath
• Duplicate highlights (Kindle sometimes double-saves) removed

Why this beats Readwise for many people

Readwise is a great product. It syncs continuously, resurfaces highlights with spaced repetition, and reaches the iOS/Android Kindle apps that don't produce My Clippings.txt at all.

But it costs $8/mo, forever, for a service most people will barely use after the novelty wears off. If you just want your highlights out — one time, into your own system — a browser converter does the job for free.

The right choice depends on what you want:

• Continuous sync, spaced repetition, mobile Kindle app: Readwise.
• One-time export from a physical Kindle, plain files you own forever: Kindle Clippings to Markdown.

Bonus: build your commonplace book

Once your highlights are Markdown, you can pipe them into any workflow. Add a template that shows a random highlight when you open Obsidian. Pipe the folder into an LLM and ask "what are the recurring themes across everything I've highlighted this year?" Publish a highlights RSS feed. Grep for "Ravikant" and see everything you ever underlined.

The value of book highlights isn't in the highlighting — it's in the revisiting. And you can't revisit what's trapped in a proprietary format.

Related tools

• Kindle Clippings to Markdown — the converter.
• Notion to Obsidian — if you want your highlights in Obsidian.
• ChatGPT to Markdown — same idea for your prompt history.