Getting highlights on personal docs from Kindle apps onto Kindle's "My Clippings.txt"

[jollino]

Hello all,
I've been looking around for this but before giving up entirely I'd like to ask confirmation to you, Great Masters of Kindle.

I currently own a Kindle Paperwhite, and also use the Kindle apps on iPhone and iPad occasionally. I mostly read what Amazon considers "personal documents", ie. out-of-copyright free classics and drafts that friends send me. I have found myself to highlight quite a lot of stuff, and it's nice to have it all synchronized across devices; what's even nicer is having everything saved in the "My Clippings.txt" file.
The problem is that while highlighting something on the iPhone will find its way to the Kindle, it will not be written out ot the file. Moreover, since Amazon does not recognize the books, it won't show up at all on kindle.amazon.com. Bummer.

Incidentally, I normally email my mobi files to my @kindle.com address. I wonder if copying them directly to the Kindle would make them appear as actual books instead of "personal documents".

Is there any way to parse the actual files on the Kindle to write the highlights to a file? I found that each book with annotations has a file with the same name with extension .mbp1 inside the .sdr directory which contains chunks of stuff all beginning with the string "annotation.personal.highlight" and followed by what appears to be location information, though it looks a little random; it also seems to be only partial, because I'm reading Blindsight (converted to mobi from the epub here http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm) and I made MANY more annotations than what this file would show.

Has anyone found a way to synchronize highlights and notes made on other devices on personal documents? I find myself reading less on other devices because of this! (I'm not normal, I kow )

Thanks!

[tomsem]

My clippings will only log annotations that you make on your Paperwhite. The annotations will sync between Kindles and Kindle apps, but there is no way to export them directly, they are stored in a 'sidecar' file. I think there is a script that can extract notes from the sidecar file but highlights are stored in there as references (pointers) to content in the book. In theory those could be dereferenced and extracted as well (for DRM free books) but I don't know if anyone has attempted to write a script for that (e.g. as a calibre plugin). It would certainly be a useful thing. With books you get from Amazon you can login to kindle.amazon.com and find your annotations there, but these don't include Personal Documents annotations.

As a workaround you could go through all of the annotations on your Kindle and edit each one (probably need to delete and recreate highlights). This would generate My Clippings entries. But obviously that is at least duplicating work.

[jollino]

You confirm my guesses, unfortunately. For the sake of the OCD-ish part of me, I may just turn off the saving to clippings so I don't feel like I'm losing stuff when using other devices. After all, as long as the documents stay in the cloud, everything's available.
I'd tinker around with the mbp1 sidecar files, but I think someone with more experience with hacking Kindles would have better luck. I'm new to the platfrom (from a hacking perspective) so I'm quite clueless!

[Shuan]

Would this be a solution for what you are looking for? -> http://www.ebookworm.us/clippings/

[susan_cassidy]

You can't turn off just saving to "My Clippings.txt". You either turn off syncing of highlights and notes, or you don't. Period.