Exporting Kindle Notes and Highlights
I have my reasons for still liking paper books once in a while, but those reasons are slowing vanishing, and the benefits of electronic books are accumulating.
I read Pinker's mammoth The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined on the Kindle app on my iPad. I was grateful not to have to read the enormous paper version of the book. It was a fascinating read, and I made lots of notes and highlights on my Kindle app. (You can make notes and highlights with a Kindle device too.)
Whenever I finish a book, I "process" it. This means going through all the notes and highlights I made and incorporating them into the books I'm writing, the literature reviews I maintain, etc. For a book the size of Pinker's, this would take a few hours.
However, on the Kindle those notes and highlights are saved automatically.
For Pinker, I had 164 highlighted passages, and a few notes. All of them were on this webpage for me to copy and paste into a googledoc. I still have to incorporate them, but I don't have to type them in.
Love it!
Added February 2013: They moved the link: https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights
Pictured: A bikeshare. Bikeshares tend to fail, I've heard, when helmet laws are in place.
Comments
Maybe there's something available like that for the iPad version. Extracting highlights like that is definitely one of the greatest unexpected perks of my e-reader.
Publishers can create Kindle books in-house from Adobe InDesign content, HTML, XHTML, and EPUB files by using the Kindle Publisher tools. Amazon officially supports these tools to convert files to Kindle Format 8. Kindle files created with these tools are designed to be compatible with current and future Kindle devices and applications. Files created with third-party software may not work properly on current or future Kindle devices and applications. book-on-kindle.com
Do all of your highlights show up now?
I hope that Amazon will one day produce an XML file of all of our highlights and notes, so that we can simply download them to one place.
Thanks for sharing. It's always good to know how to get those highlights from a Kindle device.
Actually, there's an iOS app being launched in November that will address this issue. It's called Snippefy www.snippefy.com
The app let's you read and share your Kindle highlights and notes, all in one place.
1. Highlight all entries wanted from 'my clippings'
2. paste into Word doc
3. Find and Replace, enable wildcards
4. find: ==========
replace with: ^p
5. Find: copy the exact title
replace: ^p
6. This is complicated, to remove the time stamps Find: (\- Y)(*)(\PM) for entries made in the PM or (\- Y)(*)(\AM) for entries made in the AM, if mixed you will need to separate into separate docs.
Replace: ^p
7. Find: ^13{2,}
Replace: ^p
I also edit paragraph spacing and use the 'Sentence Case' hotkey to clean it up. Then you can paste into OneNote and add bullets if you like. Very Handy
I would like to recommend http://www.clippings.io for managing your Kindle notes and clippings. As far as I can tell this is the best tool and it's completely free, enjoy!
Jim
I just built a chrome extension that allows you to print / save your highlights to your local computer, Google Drive, or dropbox. You can find it at http://www.printmykindlehighlights.com