Jun 9, 2017 - Amazon is moving your Kindle highlights and notes to a new place, which can be easily accessed from your phone or tablet. What are Kindle Notes and Highlights? Amazon has a great resource page to learn more on this topic.Here is a copy of that page Did you know? You can add or remove bookmarks, highlights, and notes at any location in a Kindle book or personal document.
As you’re reading on your Kindle Paperwhite, you may want to highlight text to refer to later or add your own notes to a particular passage. You may even want to make a Facebook post or Twitter Tweet that includes an excerpt from the e-book. The touchscreen makes it particularly convenient for you to make these marks, or annotations:
- Highlights shade a section of text to draw attention to it.
- Notes are the text you type, much like when you jot notes in the margins of a printed book.
These annotations are stored on your Kindle Paperwhite and are backed up at Amazon — as long as the annotations backup feature is turned on. To check if this is the case, tap Menu→Settings→Reading Options.
Make sure the toggle switch next to Annotations Backup is On. This setting enables you to recover your notes if you lose your Kindle Paperwhite or upgrade to another model. If you borrow a book from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library or rent a textbook, your annotations are preserved, even when you return the book.
To make an annotation, select text in your book by touching your finger to a word and dragging it across the screen. As you do so, the selected text turns white on a black background.
When you release your finger, a pop-up window provides these options: Share, Add Note, Highlight, and More.
How to highlight text on the Paperwhite
With the desired text selected, tap the Highlight button. The text is highlighted in the book — appearing as black text on a gray background.
To delete a highlight, select any of the highlighted words by touching and dragging across them or by using a long-tap. A Delete button appears in a pop-up window; tap it to remove the highlight.
Or you can adjust the starting point of the displayed text by changing the location. Touch the top of the screen to display the toolbar, and then tap Menu→Go To→Page or Location. Enter a location slightly different than the current location to shift the starting point of the displayed text, until all your desired text is displayed.
An interesting thing about highlights is that you can view highlights that other readers have made. Amazon collects this information and highlights passages in your book that have been highlighted frequently by other readers. Your Kindle Paperwhite displays how many people have highlighted that particular passage.
Although this can be intriguing, some readers find the display of popular highlights distracting. To turn off these popular highlights, follow these steps:
- Tap Menu→Settings→Reading Options.Popular Highlights is one of the Reading Options listed.
- Tap the On/Off toggle to deactivate the Popular Highlights option.
How to take notes on the Kindle Paperwhite
Want to make margin notes in your books? Well, you can with your Kindle Paperwhite. Adding notes is similar to making highlights.
With the desired text selected, tap the Add Note button. A pop-up window appears with a text entry block and the onscreen keyboard. Type your notes using the keyboard and tap then tap Save.
Note that the text associated with your note is now highlighted in your book and is followed by a superscripted number. Tapping that number displays your note’s text block — where you can edit or delete it.
How to view annotations on the Kindle Paperwhite
You can view all your notes, highlights, and bookmarks for a particular book. While reading a book, tap the top of the screen to display the toolbar. Then tap Menu→View Notes & Marks. All your notes, your highlights, and the popular highlights for that e-book are displayed.
You can view your annotations from a personal computer by going to http://kindle.amazon.com or http://kindle.amazon.co.uk. Sign in and click the Your Highlights link.
Share on Twitter and Facebook
You probably noticed that when creating or viewing highlights and notes in your book, a Share button is available. This button lets you share a note and a link to the selected passage through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. You can do all this directly from your Kindle Paperwhite. Share button is a fun way to let others know about books you’re enjoying.
When you use your Kindle Paperwhite to share on Twitter, your Tweet consists of your short note plus a Kindle Store link to the book you’re reading.
From your Kindle Paperwhite, you can also update your Facebook page with a book cover image, an excerpt of highlighted text, and a note.
To take advantage of these features, you need to link your Kindle Paperwhite with your Twitter and Facebook accounts. To do so, follow these steps:
- Tap Menu→Settings→Reading Options.
- Tap Social Networks.A screen appears. From here, you can tell your Kindle Paperwhite the usernames and passwords associated with your accounts. Note that if you have previously linked a Kindle to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you may not have to repeat these steps.
- To link to your Twitter account:
- Tap the Link Account button for Twitter.
- Enter your Twitter e-mail address and your Twitter password on the authorization screen that appears.
- To link to your Facebook account:
- Tap the Link Account button for Facebook.
- Enter your e-mail address and Facebook password on the authorization screen that appears.
After your Kindle Paperwhite is linked, you can share a note about what you’re reading by following these steps:
- From within a book, select text by sliding your finger across the page.
- Tap the Share button.
- Enter your message in the text box that appears.
- Tap Share.Your note and a link to the selected book passage posts to the account you’ve linked to your Kindle Paperwhite.
Amazon has a great reading platform in the Kindle, but sometimes it's not enough.
Sometimes I need to take the notes I make in a Kindle ebook and use them elsewhere. Amazon doesn't make it easy for us to do that, but luckily there are other ways.
Back in 2015 I needed to export my Kindle notes, so I did some digging and rounded up a few tools which would help me do just that. The tools range from the simple (copy+paste from a web browser) to the inaccessible (an iPhone app and a Mac-only script).
Now it's March 2019, and about half the tools mentioned in the original post are gone. So I have updated the post with corrected info and I've also pruned the tools that have died in the past four years.
The available tools have changed a lot over the years. For example, Amazon used to have a site called Kindle.Amazon.com where you could find your note and highlights, see what other people were writing in the margins, etc. Unfortunately, that is gone now.
That page was sorta replaced by Read.amazon.com, but not really. The new page won't let you access all of your notes, and there's no export option, so it's not really that useful for our current goal.
Edit: The above statement might not be true. I am double checking.
So let's start with the simple trick that still works.
Look in the documents folder of your E-ink Kindle and you'll see a file named myclippings.txt. This is a text file of all of the notes and highlights made on your Kindle (but not on the other Kindles or Kindle apps on your account). You can copy this folder to your PC and open it.
Boom. You can now copy and past your notes into other documents, emails, etc.
Kindle
Did you know you can have your Kindle email your annotations to you? (I didn't until Tom told me.) Amazon will email the notes and highlights to the address on your Amazon account. They will arrive as a PDF and a CSV attached to the email.
You can access the export option from the Notes menu which can be found in the 3 dot menu dropdown inside the ebook you're reading.
iPad, Android, Kindle Fire
The Kindle apps for iOS and Android have a feature which is alsonot shared by the Kindle Fire tablets. They have a notebook menu where you can find all of the highlights and notes for an ebook.
This menu is accessible from inside the ebook, and one of the things you'll find there is an option to share your annotations by email. Here's what it looks like on the iPad:
The notebook menu can be accessed from inside a book, but the way you find it differs between Android, iOS, and the Kindle Fire.
On iOS, click the “sheet of paper” icon in the upper right corner. The export button is in the upper right corner of the notebook menu. The exported notes don't look very good, but this trick does let you pull the notes out of even a side-loaded ebook.
On Android, click the '3 dots' icon in the upper right corner, and then select the Notebook option from the dropdown menu. You can either create flashcards or export the notes to Drive, by email, or by Android Beam.
On the Kindle Fire, open the ebook and press the center of the screen. One of the icons you will see across the top of the screen will look like a piece of paper. That is the notebook menu, and the export option is in the upper right corner.
Bookcision
This nifty little bookmarklet is simple and works great with Chrome. After you install it, you use it be opening one an ebook's highlights page on Read.amazon.com and then clicking the bookmarklet button.
I liked Bookcision because it worked well with Chrome. With other web browsers, you can save the notes to the clipboard, but with Chrome I also get multiple download options (text, XML, JSON). The latter two options include a link to the note's location in the ebook.
Notescraper
When I first published this post, Notescraper was an Apple Script based tool which basically did the same thing as Bookcision. It copied the notes from a book's highlights page on Kindle.amazon.com and created local file on your Mac. But it's now 2019, and I don't know whether this script will work just as well on Read.Amazon.com, but I am including it just in case it still works.
There are a couple versions of the Notescraper tool, including one which works with Evernote. But since I don't have a Mac, I can't comment on how well it works.
Speaking of Evernote, its webclipping can be used to import your notes and highlights.
Evernote WebClipper
This tool can be used to copy part of a page or an entire webpage into your Evernote account, and I'm told it works well to copy notes from a book's highlights page on Read.amazon.com.
But you might want to manually select the book notes though and copy and paste. There's one report that the page has an infinite scroll built-in that messes up one user's Evernote clipper.
And while we're on the topic, Microsoft's OneNote has a similar clipping tool. It takes screenshots so it's not nearly as useful, but if you already use that platform then it's worth a look.
Clippings.io
Here's another service I'm not sure I can recommend.
Clippings.io is supposed to offer an easy to use online service for managing your Kindle notes and highlights, but I haven't found a good reason to continue using it.
While I was setting it up, I noticed that this 'free' service works with a Chrome plugin which costs $2 (you can also find the myclippings.txt file and upload it). That turned me off, and since it basically duplicates activities I already perform on my PC, I plan to close the tab and forget about it.
Calibre
And last but not least, calibre. This ebook library tool can not only send ebooks to your Kindle, it can also fetch the annotations from a Kindle - only there's a catch.
This only works when you have your Kindle plugged into your PC over USB. And it apparently doesn't work for newer Kindles.
I found this trick while researching this post, and I also found a bug report which says that this feature doesn't work with newer Kindles. I can't get it to work with my Paperwhites, for example.
But since it might work for you, I'm including it here. Head on over to JetShred for instructions and more details.
Conclusion
All in all, there are a lot of tools out there that either don't work, aren't terribly useful, or are intended to work in only specific circumstances.
But I found at least one tool that I like, so I'm good.
Did you find one you could use? Did I miss one?
The comments are open.
image by Terry Madeley via Flickr