How to Export Kindle Highlights and Notes (2026 Guide)

Q: What's the best way to use Kindle highlights with ChatGPT or Claude?

Export your highlights via the web notebook in plain text format, paste them into your AI tool, and ask for synthesis or review questions. For passages that need context, extract full pages from Kindle Cloud Reader using TextMuncher, then feed the complete section to the AI.

You've been highlighting Kindle books for years. Passages you wanted to remember, ideas you planned to revisit, quotes you thought you'd use someday. The problem is those highlights are sitting inside Amazon's ecosystem, mostly inaccessible unless you know where to look.

This guide covers every method that actually works in 2026 — from the free tools Amazon provides to third-party sync services — plus how to get your highlights working with AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude.

The Four Ways to Export Kindle Highlights

There are four methods worth knowing, each suited to a different situation:

Method	Cost	What You Get	Best For
Kindle web notebook	Free	Up to 10% of each book's highlights	Quick exports, occasional use
My Clippings.txt	Free	Everything you've highlighted on that device	Full backup of device highlights
Readwise	$7.99/month	Auto-sync to Notion, Obsidian, Anki, etc.	Active readers who use their highlights
Full-context extraction	Free–$6/month	Complete page text surrounding your highlights	When you need more than the quoted sentence

There's one important limitation across all methods: Amazon's 10% clipping limit. Publishers set a cap on how much text can be exported per book — typically 10% of total length. Once you hit it, Kindle stops saving new highlights to export. Your highlights still appear in the book, but they won't show up in your notebook or clippings file. This affects the first three methods. The fourth bypasses it entirely.

Method 1: Kindle's Web Notebook

The easiest free method is Amazon's own notebook tool at read.amazon.com/notebook. Every highlight you've made across all your Kindle books and apps is organized here by title.

To export from the web notebook:

Go to read.amazon.com/notebook in any desktop browser
Select a book from your library
Click the export icon (top right of the book view)
Choose your format — plain text, HTML, or CSV

The export gives you each highlight as a separate entry, with the location in the book and any notes you added. For most titles, this covers your full highlight history up to the 10% publisher cap.

One thing to know: Amazon restricted copying directly from the notebook app on mobile in late 2025. The desktop web export still works. If you're hitting Kindle's copy restrictions on mobile, the desktop notebook is your workaround.

Method 2: My Clippings.txt on Your Kindle Device

If you own a Kindle e-reader (not just the app), your device stores every highlight and note you've ever made in a single file called My Clippings.txt. This file doesn't have a publisher cap — it captures everything regardless of the 10% limit.

Here's where to find it:

Connect your Kindle to your computer via USB
Open the Kindle as a storage drive
Find documents/My Clippings.txt in the root folder
Copy it to your computer

The file is plain text. Each clipping looks like this:

The Design of Everyday Things (Donald A. Norman)
- Your Highlight on page 52 | location 792-794 | Added on Monday, March 15, 2026

"The designer has to know whether it is appropriate to give the user a powerful but complex design tool, or a simple, restricted one."
==========

Every highlight from every book, all in one place. The downside is that it only contains what was highlighted on that specific device — highlights from the Kindle app on your phone or tablet won't appear here unless you also sync them to a physical device.

For anyone with an older Kindle that's losing store access in May 2026, copying My Clippings.txt before the cutoff is worth doing. The file itself isn't affected by Amazon's service changes, but it's good practice to back it up now.

Method 3: Readwise

Readwise ($7.99/month) connects directly to your Amazon account and pulls all your Kindle highlights automatically. It then re-sends you those highlights daily via email ("Daily Review"), and syncs everything to Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, Anki, and other tools you might already use.

For readers who actually go back to their highlights — to review them, add to notes, or incorporate them into writing — Readwise is the best option by a significant margin. The automation removes all friction. Your highlights appear in Notion the same day you make them.

The limitation is the same 10% publisher cap that affects Amazon's own notebook. Readwise doesn't bypass the cap; it just makes the highlights easier to use.

If you're primarily looking for a one-time backup rather than ongoing sync, the free methods above are enough. Readwise makes sense if you want your highlights woven into a note-taking system you use every day.

When You Need More Than Just the Highlight

Here's a problem none of the standard export tools solve: the highlight is one sentence, but the meaning requires the surrounding paragraph.

You marked something interesting three years ago. Now you open the export and see the quote, but the context that made it meaningful is missing. Was this a claim the author was making, or refuting? What was the example that followed?

This is where full-page extraction becomes useful. Instead of exporting just the highlighted sentence, you extract the full text of the pages around it — then you have the passage, the paragraph before, and the example after.

I built TextMuncher for exactly this kind of extraction. You open the book in Kindle Cloud Reader, navigate to the section you need, and the extension captures the full page text automatically. You get clean, copyable text — not just the isolated quote.

It also works when you've hit the 10% highlight limit and can no longer export new highlights through Amazon's notebook. If the text is visible in Cloud Reader, TextMuncher can extract it, regardless of how many highlights you've already exported.

For the highlights-and-context workflow: export your highlights via the notebook to get the list of passages, then use TextMuncher to extract the full pages around the ones that need more context. You get the best of both: structured highlight history plus the surrounding material when you need it.

How to Use Your Kindle Highlights with AI

The most useful thing you can do with exported highlights in 2026 is feed them to an AI tool for synthesis, review, or study.

A few workflows that work well:

Book summary and synthesis: Export all highlights from a book, paste them into Claude or ChatGPT, and ask for a synthesis of the main themes. Faster than re-reading, and the AI connects dots across highlights you made months apart. See more on reading Kindle books with AI for the full workflow.

Active recall: Export highlights from a chapter, then ask the AI to quiz you on the material using only what you highlighted. This works better than trying to generate quiz questions yourself — the AI surfaces the gaps in what you actually marked.

Literature review: For researchers pulling quotes from multiple books, export highlights from several titles, combine them into one document, and ask the AI to find connections, contradictions, or supporting evidence for a specific argument.

Daily review with context: Readwise sends you highlights daily, but they're decontextualized. For the ones you want to actually understand, pull the surrounding pages with TextMuncher and re-read the section before responding to the daily email.

The raw highlight alone — a single sentence in a text file — isn't that useful on its own. Combined with an AI that can reason across multiple highlights, or with the full page context, it becomes a working research archive.

Conclusion

Your Kindle highlights are worth keeping. The free methods (web notebook, My Clippings.txt) cover most use cases. Readwise is the right tool if you use your highlights actively and want them in Notion or Obsidian. And when you need the surrounding passage rather than just the quote, extracting full page text from Cloud Reader fills the gap.

The one thing to do now: back up your My Clippings.txt file. It's sitting on your Kindle device, unsynced to any cloud, and it contains every highlight you've made on that hardware. Copy it to your computer today.

FAQ

How do I export all my Kindle highlights at once?

Go to read.amazon.com/notebook in a desktop browser, select a book, and click the export icon. For highlights across all books in one file, connect your Kindle device via USB and copy documents/My Clippings.txt — this contains every highlight made on that device, regardless of publisher limits.

Why are some of my Kindle highlights missing from the export?

Amazon's 10% clipping limit caps how much text can be exported per book — set by publishers. Once you hit the limit, new highlights are still saved in-book but stop appearing in your notebook export or My Clippings.txt. Highlights made before you hit the limit are still there. The only way around it is full-page extraction from Kindle Cloud Reader.

Can I export Kindle highlights to Notion or Obsidian?

Yes, but you'll need Readwise ($7.99/month). It connects to your Amazon account and auto-syncs highlights to Notion, Obsidian, Logseq, and Anki. Amazon's free notebook tool exports to text and CSV, but doesn't have native Notion or Obsidian integration.

Does My Clippings.txt include all my highlights?

It includes all highlights made on that specific physical Kindle device. Highlights made in the Kindle app on your phone or tablet are stored separately in Amazon's cloud, not in My Clippings.txt. Use the web notebook at read.amazon.com/notebook to access highlights from all devices and apps.

What's the best way to use Kindle highlights with ChatGPT or Claude?

Export your highlights via the web notebook (plain text format), paste them into your AI tool of choice, and ask for synthesis, summaries, or review questions. For passages that need surrounding context, extract the full pages from Kindle Cloud Reader using TextMuncher, then feed the complete section to the AI. The AI works best with complete passages rather than isolated quotes.

Try TextMuncher free — 30 pages included, extract the full context around any highlight.