What is your way to get highlights of any book on Kindle to PC

[markus98]

I really like to actually work with books in the form of highlighting parts to go over it again later. While highlighting works quite well, going over highlights on the Kindle itself is just not really a great user experience. Actually, it is ridiculous how bad this is implemented. My fastest way was just to fast flip through every single page of an ebook on the Kindle.

What I would love but unfortunately do not get:
Fully automatically sync highlighted passages to Evernote


A workaround I came up with so far:

1. Highlight passages in the ebook while reading
2. Connect Kindle to PC
3. Use https://www.clippings.io and import all the highlights of all the books to clippings
4. Export highlights from clippings to Evernote

I did not work that much with this workaround, so I am sure there are still some issues, e.g., deleted notes or books not synced, maybe redundant highlights.

• Do you have an alternative approach?
• Is there an ebook reader (hardware) that works better with highlights + exports than Kindle?
• What if I reset my Kindle? All the highlights will be lost? How can I save them / embed them to the actual ebook file?

I know for Amazon purchased books you can access highlights at https://read.amazon.com/ but this does not work for all books.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by markus98

I really like to actually work with books in the form of highlighting parts to go over it again later. ..

I know for Amazon purchased books you can access highlights at https://read.amazon.com/ but this does not work for all books.

Amazon provide all the features you could wish for, for the books you pay them for.
Seems a fair exchange to me

Why should they add features for non payers ?

if you don't want to buy amazon books, then don't expect workarounds for missing features to magically appear on Amazon hardware.

the only reason Amazon sell readers is to encourage amazon e-book purchases, they probably make no money at all on sales the actual Kindles, Fire tablets...

[j.p.s]

I agree that reviewing hightlights on a kindle is excruciatingly painful when there are more than few highlights.

I use KRDS from the thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=322172 to get a list of highlight locations and azw3r.pl from the thread https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=321811 to extract the text of the highlights from the book.

I also use notes_insert.pl from the second thread to make an HTML file of the text of the book with the highlighted text as bold.

The output of azw3r.pl can probably be put into evernote, but I know nothing about that.

azw3r.pl is for books in KF8/azw3 format. KRDS can generate a list of highlight locations for KFX books, but I do not know of anything that extracts the highlighted text from KFX.

[markus98]

Originally Posted by stumped

Amazon provide all the features you could wish for, for the books you pay them for.
Seems a fair exchange to me

Why should they add features for non payers ?

if you don't want to buy amazon books, then don't expect workarounds for missing features to magically appear on Amazon hardware.

the only reason Amazon sell readers is to encourage amazon e-book purchases, they probably make no money at all on sales the actual Kindles, Fire tablets...

fair enough ... however, I think other e-readers e.g. Kobo do not provide a nice solution either

[markus98]

Wow, quite complex. Thanks for sharing. In my case that is even more complicated than my workaround, but for others it might help. Thanks.

[stumped]

Originally Posted by markus98

fair enough ... however, I think other e-readers e.g. Kobo do not provide a nice solution either

that's true, and for the same reason - what's in it for them to bother ?

using reader apps on neutral hardware probably offers the best opportunities for extracting and saving stuff

Or, if you use send to kindle to transfer your non amazon purchases as personal documents via amazon, ( format shifting first if needed) can you then get at highlights you make to those "documents" via their cloud or via your account pages on their web site ? I think you can & it may be worth testing.

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by stumped

using reader apps on neutral hardware probably offers the best opportunities for extracting and saving stuff

Or, if you use send to kindle to transfer your non amazon purchases as personal documents via amazon, ( format shifting first if needed) can you then get at highlights you make to those "documents" via their cloud or via your account pages on their web site ? I think you can & it may be worth testing.

The Kindle app for iOS (and I assume Android) allows exporting highlights in pretty HTML. Caveat, there's like 10% max you can export via this method for purchased books.

Normally that 10% seems quite generous. However, when I tried exporting the exact same highlights using two different citation styles, it counted against the quota twice. That said, the method works quite nicely with Personal Documents (no export limit).

Personally, I tend to use DRM-free EPUB with Marvin for iOS for highlighting fiction. That gives me multiple export options: EPUB, HTML, PDF, CSV. There's also JSON (Marvin -> Marvin) and SQLite3 (Marvin Backup and Restore).

My technical documents are typically PDF so I just use GoodReader for those. PDF's probably the only universally supported format for annotations.

[mergen3107]

Try Kindle Mate. It does exactly what you want: you import Clippings.txt, it shows you all books' highlights, which you can carefully select/remove unnecessary ones, and then export to a text file.