Searching for your Kindle highlights is a thing you do twice in the same week. Once to find them, once to get them out. The two questions deserve one answer.
Highlights live in three places at the same time. None of them is obvious. Each has a different ceiling on what you can do with it.
Every Kindle highlight lives in three places at once
Every passage you highlight on a Kindle is written in three places at once.
The first is your device. There is a plain text file at documents/My Clippings.txt on every Kindle. Plug the device into a computer and it shows up. Every highlight, note, and bookmark is in there as readable text with the book title, author, location, and timestamp. It is the only copy you fully own.
The second is Amazon's cloud, accessible at read.amazon.com/notebook. This is the official Kindle Notes and Highlights viewer. It pulls in everything you have highlighted across every Kindle device and app you have ever signed into. It is the only copy that survives a factory reset.
The third is Goodreads, if you have linked your accounts. Highlights you choose to share end up on the book's page there. Most people do not use this, and it is not where you go to get your data out.
If you have been guessing at URLs like amazon.com/highlights or kindle.amazon.com and finding nothing, that is why. The viewer lives at read.amazon.com/notebook, on a different subdomain to the rest of your Amazon account.
What read.amazon.com/notebook does well, and where it stops
The notebook viewer is fine for one thing. You want to reread a single book's highlights, and you do not want to plug anything in. Open the book in the sidebar, scroll, done.
It stops being useful the moment you ask any of the following:
- Show me every highlight I have ever made about a single idea, across books.
- Let me copy more than a few passages from one book in a session without hitting a publisher cap.
- Hide popular highlights from other readers so my own selections are not buried.
- Send these somewhere else automatically.
The cross-book search is the big one. The notebook treats each book as a silo. If you remember a passage about attention but cannot remember which book, you scroll. The popular-highlights overlay (the dotted underlines other readers added) is on by default and easy to mistake for your own. Some publishers also restrict how much of a book you can copy, so a long copy-paste session quietly stops working.
My Clippings.txt: the export everyone forgets they already have
The fastest free path is the one that ships on the device. Plug the Kindle in via USB, open the drive, and copy documents/My Clippings.txt somewhere safe. That file is yours. Amazon does not get a vote.
It looks like this for each highlight:
The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt, Andrew) - Your Highlight on Location 412-414 | Added on Saturday, March 7, 2026 11:42:18 AM Don't live with broken windows. ==========
A few real notes if you have not done this before:
- On macOS, modern Kindles often need a USB transfer app like OpenMTP to show up as a drive. Apple stopped shipping Android File Transfer in usable shape years ago.
- The file only contains highlights from books you read on that physical device. Books you only ever read in the Kindle iOS or Android app are not in there. Those live on Amazon's cloud only.
- It includes bookmarks and notes too, not just highlights. You can ignore the bookmark lines or strip them later.
If you only ever read on one Kindle and you do not need anything fancy, this file plus a text editor is genuinely enough. I have known people to keep their commonplace book in vim and a My Clippings.txt they re-import every few months.
Tools that get your highlights out of Amazon and into something useful
Three working paths, in the order I would actually recommend them.
Readwise, if highlights are the format your brain works in
Readwise is the leader for highlight-first workflows and there is no honest reason to pretend otherwise. It logs into your Amazon account, syncs your Kindle highlights automatically, sends you a daily review email of older passages, and exports cleanly to Notion, Obsidian, and a long list of others. Pricing is Lite at around $5.59/month and Full at $9.99/month, both billed annually, with a 30-day free trial.
If your saved content is overwhelmingly Kindle and you want spaced-repetition review of passages, start there. Keep does not do daily highlight review and is not trying to.
Readwise also ships Bookcision, a free bookmarklet that runs on read.amazon.com and lets you download the highlights from one book at a time as plain text, JSON, or XML. No account needed. If you only want one book's highlights right now, Bookcision is the fastest free option that exists.
Keep, if your Kindle highlights are one source among many
Keep imports My Clippings.txt directly. Drop the file into Keep's import page, and it parses every highlight, note, and bookmark, then creates one item per book with the highlights as the body, source link included, timestamps preserved. Up to a thousand books per import. The parsing happens locally in your browser, Amazon is not involved.
What makes Keep different is what sits next to those imports. A quote from a Kindle book sits next to a quote from an article you saved with the extension, and a tweet you bookmarked. All of it in one searchable library, all of it plain markdown, all of it readable by the Keep MCP server so any LLM client can query across the lot. "Find every passage I have saved about deep work, from books or articles" is a real prompt that returns real answers.
What Keep does not do is highlight-first review or per-passage spaced repetition. If you live and die by daily highlight review, Readwise is still the right starting point. Keep is the right starting point if Kindle is one of four or five places you save things from and you want them all in one library that you actually own.
The Keep Kindle import guide has the step-by-step.
Calibre, if you are already a power user
Calibre has been the de facto e-book toolkit for decades and is still actively maintained. It can read your .azw3 files directly off a connected Kindle and pull out annotations alongside the books themselves. There is a steeper learning curve than the other options, no cloud sync, and the highlight tools are rough around the edges. If you already use Calibre to manage a personal library and you do not want a SaaS subscription, it is the path of least extra software.
I would not start here if you have never opened Calibre before. It rewards effort, but it asks for it first.
Picking one
The two-line version. If you mostly read on Kindle and want review built in, start with Readwise. If Kindle is one of several sources and you want a single library, import your highlights into Keep and build the rest of your saving on top.
Both options leave your My Clippings.txt file untouched and on your device, which is the part that matters. Whatever tool you pick this year, that file is the receipt. Getting the highlights out is the easy half; making yourself actually re-read them is where most people fall down.