How do YOU keep track of your highlights/notes?

[arooni]

Devices: Kindle PW2 and Kindle Fire tablet. I have an Ubuntu laptop and a Mac desktop (that Calibre is installed on)

As I try to become a better reader and cut down my television time I find myself taking notes / making a lot of highlights; and I'd rather not lose them. I primarily read side loaded books so the whole online Kindle highlights doesn't work so well. I know they're in myclippings.txt but I'd love to hear about what you do to keep track of what you've read?

Options I've thought about so far:

• Exporting 'notebook' to Google Drive / Dropbox
• Keeping a text file with the book name and notes and using vim to edit/view
• http://kmate.me/download/ ; Kindle Mate -- but i can't use it because I don't have a PC
• SToring annotations in calibre per book

I primarily read non fiction so I'd love to have a way to retrieve this knowledge in an easy and straightforward way.

Thanks in advance.

[tomsem]

The most convenient option will be to use Send To Kindle to add books to your library as ‘Docs’. Then any notes you make on Kindle will sync to cloud and you can use the Fire (after downloading the same book to it) to Export Notebook as an email attachment or save to OneDrive/OneNote/Evernote/Dropbox or what have you. Kindle also has Export feature but it can only be used with Books (from amazon).

If you side-load exclusively to Kindle then you need to use my clippings.txt, and there are tools to extract these.

[shamanNS]

As alternative to Kindle Mate you can use https://www.clippings.io , it also parses MyClippings file.

[arooni]

Originally Posted by shamanNS

As alternative to Kindle Mate you can use https://www.clippings.io , it also parses MyClippings file.

Wow! I had always heard of Evernote but assumed it was only an iphone app type thing. Combined with clippings.io it's a beautiful way of keeping my book highlights and notes in sync across multiple devices. Thanks for your suggestion!

[arooni]

Let's say I side load a AZW3 file to my Kindle Paperwhite because it looks better than the mobi equivalent.

Then I also send the book in mobi format to my kindle fire tablet. If I then make some highlights on the kindle fire tablet; is there any way to get those highlights into myclippings.txt ?

Or am I stuck with the export notebook as the only method for getting notes off of it?

[shamanNS]

MyClippings is just a simple (event) log file that Kindle eInk device creates or appends more "text" to it: each time you highlight some text (or add a note, or create a bookmark) in a book that text gets added to the end of MyClippings along with extra info such as book title, location in the book and time created. So no, you can't "sync to MyClippings" something that you did on other device (such as Kindle Fire).

The official ways of keeping two Kindle devices (or device + Kindle app) in sync works by getting/sending info from/to Amazon servers and storing it locally in "sidecar" file (for old mobi format the extension of that file was .mbp). Those files keep permanent record of your notes, MyClippings is temporary storage..... if you delete it completely Kindle will not recreate new one that would contain all previous notes but it would start from fresh, empty MyClippings file which then gets filled up as you create NEW notes.

[arooni]

Originally Posted by shamanNS

MyClippings is just a simple (event) log file that Kindle eInk device creates or appends more "text" to it: each time you highlight some text (or add a note, or create a bookmark) in a book that text gets added to the end of MyClippings along with extra info such as book title, location in the book and time created. So no, you can't "sync to MyClippings" something that you did on other device (such as Kindle Fire).

The official ways of keeping two Kindle devices (or device + Kindle app) in sync works by getting/sending info from/to Amazon servers and storing it locally in "sidecar" file (for old mobi format the extension of that file was .mbp). Those files keep permanent record of your notes, MyClippings is temporary storage..... if you delete it completely Kindle will not recreate new one that would contain all previous notes but it would start from fresh, empty MyClippings file which then gets filled up as you create NEW notes.

I'm a little unclear on the way you mention that I keep my Kindle PW in sync with the kindle app on my fire tablet... it sounds like you're describing the technical aspect of sending a dual format mobi file to multiple kindle email addresses correct?

[shamanNS]

The only way you can create notes on one device and have them appear on the other is by emailing your books to Amazon. The books can be in old mobi or dual mobi format, that doesn't change how sync works, but yes : sending dula mobi is better.

My previous comment just stated that you can't use programs that just parse MyClippings.txt file (most of them do just that, no idea how Calibre's "annotations" feature works: does it parse MyClippings.txt or sidecar files) if you expect to have notes from all of your devices. That way you would get only notes created on you PW2, the ones you made while reading on your Kindle Fire would be missing.

And that "sync notes via cloud" feature doesn't utilize (or populate) MyClippings.txt file.

[arooni]

Gotcha. Seems the only way to get the highlights all in one place is to use the tablets export highlights method correct ? That should have highlights from my tablet and Paperwhite all in the same place