A Helping Hand…transferring your notes and highlights from your Kindle or Kindle app

Just lately, I seem to have come across a number of people who have been scratching their heads, wondering how to get their notes and highlights off their Kindle/Kindle app. It’s not hard, I promise. Hopefully, these step-by-step tips will help.

Let’s start with the Kindle app. I’ll start with that because the app has less functionality than the actual Kindle. You can add highlights or notes to the book text on your Kindle app simply by selecting the word/phrase/paragraph. Once selected, you will automatically be given four options:

All your highlights or notes will then appear in a list to the left of the text:

Okay.  So now you want to save these for future reference.  Go to https://kindle.amazon.com, then click on Your Highlights (you may be asked to sign into your Amazon account at some point):

And you will see all your highlights or notes for each of your books:

You can then select and copy whatever you want from there (or do a screenshot, or use the snipping tool). They can be pasted into an email/Word doc/whatever.

Simples!

Right, so let’s move on to the Kindle.  First connect your Kindle to your PC.  Locate the Kindle directory and then find the Documents folder.

There you will find a file called My Clippings.

Open this file up (it will probably launch in Notepad), and you will find all your notes and highlights.

Select your required text (or use Control A if you want to select the whole lot).  Open up a new document in Word.  Control V for paste and the text will look like this:

You can then save this document for future reference, or if you want to share it with someone by email, just attach the document as you would normally. (You can of course use the same method as with the Kindle app and just go to Your Highlights.)  Personally, I find this way, for the Kindle, easier and more convenient. If you haven’t cleared out your My Clippings for a while and have a number of books’ highlights/notes, it is little easier to navigate to your chosen book, than trying to find the book and its highlights online, where all highlights and notes of all your books will be listed.

Et voilà!  That, as they say, is all there is to it.  There is only one option for the Kindle app, but you have a choice of two with the actual Kindle, so try both methods out and see which one suits you best.