Organizing clippings

[manda243]

I must say that I love the clippings feature on my K3 (one of the main reasons I switched from the Kobo.) The issue that I ma having is when i clip excerpts from books, they go into a huge file full of mish-mashed clippings. I recently joined a book club and would like keep my club book clippings separate from other books for easy reference. Is there any way to do this? I haven't had much of a chance to play with it but I'm sure I could change file names on my PC but am not sure what would happen when I synced again. Any options would be great!!

[Viseguy]

The clippings file ("My Clippings", in the Documents folder) is a text (.txt) file. You can edit it in any text editor, then save it (or e-mail it) back to your Kindle under the same or a different filename. For that matter, you can move the clippings into multiple files, organized by author or however you like. In short, you can do pretty much whatever you want.

[TheKindleWorm]

Your highlights and notes can only be stored in the one file on your kindle.

If you are making notes on books bought from Amazon then you can also view the clippings online which you might find easier:
http://kindle.amazon.com/home/welcome

The other thing which might help is if you precede every note with BC or some letters to indicate Book Club so that you can search through your clippings file and find all your book club extracs faster.

[sirmaru]

Originally Posted by TheKindleWorm

If you are making notes on books bought from Amazon then you can also view the clippings online which you might find easier:
http://kindle.amazon.com/home/welcome

That new Amazon clipping site is really great. I never knew about it until you noted it here.

[tomsem]

'My Clippings.txt' is a log file that records each bookmark, note, or highlight you create on your Kindle (regardless of whether it was from Amazon). If you delete a note or highlight, no record is made of such a deletion. If you remove an annotated item, the log record of the annotation remains. If you modify a note, it will still have a record of the original note. So the point is that My Clippings is a historical record, not a snapshot of the current state of notes, highlights, and bookmarks.

Highlights, notes and bookmarks created for books linked to your Amazon account are saved with your account and can be viewed on any Kindle or Kindle app linked to it. But only the device/app where the note was created will have a record in the 'My Clippings.txt' file (and if the clippings file is deleted for whatever reason, not even then).

It would be nice if Kindle had an 'export' feature that let you generate a text file with a 'snapshot' of all of the annotations, bookmarks, and highlights that exist on that device at the time. As it is there's not always an easy way to extract notes/highlights for re-use on a computer, etc., apart from going to each item, viewing 'my notes and marks' and taking screenshots, etc. I'll be sending this suggestion to kindle-feedback@amazon.com...

[sirmaru]

If you go here:

http://kindle.amazon.com/your_reading

ALL your books, read and unread are listed. Clicking on them gives the current state of highlights with and without notes. Once a book is read, flashcards of those highlights and notes are available as well. That should be a big help for students trying to read books for classes.

Those highlights and notes can be copied and pasted at will to chat rooms and/or documents. Its better than the Clippings file since the latter is not adjusted for deletions and is hard to access (one must copy it to a PC to copy from it).

By the way, one can stay signed in to that site even if one signs out from the main Amazon site.

One question, if I deleted a book from that site, can I get it back there?

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by sirmaru

If you go here:

http://kindle.amazon.com/your_reading

ALL your books, read and unread are listed. Clicking on them gives the current state of highlights with and without notes. Once a book is read, flashcards of those highlights and notes are available as well. That should be a big help for students trying to read books for classes.

Those highlights and notes can be copied and pasted at will to chat rooms and/or documents. Its better than the Clippings file since the latter is not adjusted for deletions and is hard to access (one must copy it to a PC to copy from it).

By the way, one can stay signed in to that site even if one signs out from the main Amazon site.

One question, if I deleted a book from that site, can I get it back there?

Ah, I missed that (about where to find the Notes), thanks! Obviously I don't use that feature very much <g>

I still think an 'Export annotations..' feature would be very useful (esp for non amazon content).

[desertblues]

Originally Posted by TheKindleWorm

Your highlights and notes can only be stored in the one file on your kindle.

If you are making notes on books bought from Amazon then you can also view the clippings online which you might find easier:
http://kindle.amazon.com/home/welcome

The other thing which might help is if you precede every note with BC or some letters to indicate Book Club so that you can search through your clippings file and find all your book club extracs faster.

Thanks Kindle Worm, didn't know about that one.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by tomsem

Ah, I missed that (about where to find the Notes), thanks! Obviously I don't use that feature very much <g>

I still think an 'Export annotations..' feature would be very useful (esp for non amazon content).

Agreed! I wish there were an individual "Export annotations" for each book like Sony does. On the other hand, I enjoy being able to clip full articles in blogs and periodicals quickly to the My Clippings file. I would like the best of both worlds, please!

In case it's not clear from the other posts, the Kindle website referenced includes a listing of your purchased paperbooks from Amazon too. And, it includes books on your wish list in the "Hope To Read" category. Since I am a new Kindle user, I was perplexed at first as to why my bookshelf was so large.